Three Little Words

“Outwardly, perhaps.” Connor’s eyes darkened. “Except I’ve already figured you out. You’re a happy, singsong Marian the Librarian to all appearances, but inside, beneath the cocoon of small-town life, is another person waiting to burst free. Like a butterfly.”

The muscles in Tess’s stomach clutched, even though he was getting carried away. She really was the nice, normal person she claimed. She didn’t need to be set free.

From what? she silently scoffed. Her life was her own. Entirely her own.

“Well, Connor, that sounds nice, it really does. But on the other hand, I’m pretty certain that you just called me a caterpillar.”

He smiled, but his gaze was even deeper and softer than before. It enfolded her. “By any other name…”

Dear Reader,

Hello from the North Country!

As I’m writing this letter, it’s a beautiful summer day with breezes playing through the trees and sunshine glittering on the lake. But by the time you read this, I'll be plunged into the dead of winter with snowdrifts up to my eyeballs. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is a land of extremes, where only the tough survive—as long as the tough have a good heating system and a snow shovel.

In this story, the second in my NORTH COUNTRY STORIES miniseries, Connor Reed comes to the wilderness to escape his notoriety as a true crime writer. Is there anywhere more remote or romantic to escape to than a lighthouse, seemingly at the edge of the world? Small-town librarian Tess Bucek is certainly intrigued by the stranger in town, and it’s not long before truths of the heart are revealed….

Look for my next NORTH COUNTRY book in November of this year. And please visit my Web site at www.carriealexander.com for news of future books, contests and “North Country” photos and map.

Sincerely,

Carrie

Three Little Words

Carrie Alexander

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

THE MAN LOOKED like a smuggler.

In a library? Amused with the incongruity, Tess Bucek slid the card from the pocket of Sis Boom Bah! A Survival Guide to Cheerleading Camp and passed the book beneath the bar-code scanner. She was so accustomed to the task that it wasn’t necessary to look away from the suspicious character loitering between the arts and history sections. As he moved to one of the study tables with a stack of books, she stamped a date on the card in red and returned it to the pocket.

“Due back in three weeks.” Tess slid the book across the checkout desk to Sarah Johnson, who would have been her niece if she’d married into the family as planned. Instead, they were merely acquaintances, and lucky to be that since Tess wasn’t on speaking terms with Sarah’s father, Erik. “Have a nice time at camp.”

“Oh, I will. Thanks, Miss Bucek,” Sarah bubbled, thrilled about making the JV cheerleading squad before school had let out for the summer. “I can already do a super cartwheel, but my herkies…”

Tess smiled and nodded as Sarah went on about cheerleading stunts, surreptitiously rising off her heels and telescoping her neck to keep sight of the stranger seated beyond the girl’s bobbing blond ponytail.

He was tall, dark and mysterious. Tess would have shivered if she was the shivering type.

A smuggler with a tortured conscience, she decided as Sarah finally said goodbye. There was an air about him—intense, conflicted, maybe even dangerous. Definitely shady.

Grosse Pointe Blank, Tony Soprano, The Tulip Thief, every detective novel she’d ever read…they all filtered through Tess’s quick-firing synapses. After serving more than ten years as a librarian in a poky small town where “danger” meant icy roads or the fire index, pop culture was all she had for reference. She preferred fiction, anyway. Particularly when it came to the criminal element.

She’d honed a vivid imagination during the time when she’d been stuck in a one-bedroom cottage with her newly divorced and depressed mother, listening to a limited collection of Beatles, Bread and Simon and Garfunkel LPs. Ever since the bow tie that was really a spy camera in the song “America,” Tess had taken to making up little stories about everyone around her. Their next-door neighbor with the green thumb had become a poisoner burying bodies in the petunia patch. She imagined that her fourth-grade teacher, bland Mrs. Gorski, metamorphosed into a disco diva after the bell rang, complete with polyester wrap dress and sparkly blue eye shadow.

Even now, Tess continued to indulge her flights of fancy. Cheap entertainment for the comfortably settled.

Impelled by an inward squiggly feeling—not a shiver—Tess stepped out from behind the desk and grabbed the half-filled return cart parked nearby. The wheels squeaked as she pushed it toward the 900s—the history section. The stranger looked up from his book, his gaze watchful. Perhaps leery.

She smiled her pleasant professional-librarian smile. “Did you find what you wanted, sir?”

The man had keen eyes, even though his lashes lowered and his gaze avoided hers. Oddly evasive, Tess thought with a genuine twinge of suspicion.

The stranger nodded and returned to the open book, ducking his head between hunched shoulders. The back of his collar gaped around locks of wavy black hair. The long hair and a chin shadowed with stubble gave him the intriguing devil-may-care air that had sparked her imagination, even though a similar look was affected by a good third of the local single-male population. On them it was scrubby and slapdash. On this guy—dashing.

Tess sneaked a peak at the heavily illustrated book he’d selected. Lighthouses. Just as he’d asked for. She’d volunteered to show him the way, but he’d wanted to browse.

He’s the brains behind a Canadian smuggling operation, she decided. A modern-day pirate. Hence the lighthouse research. He’d come to Alouette scouting for a remote drop-off point. Guns or drugs, she imagined.

Or animal smuggling. Monkeys, marmosets or exotic birds—rare blue macaws. That’s what Jack Colton had been doing in Romancing the Stone and she remembered an article in a back issue of Smithsonian about the trafficking of rare species. Except it didn’t make a lot of sense, sneaking contraband across two borders….

Abandoning Dewey decimal, Tess blindly thrust a cookbook among the Egyptians. Black-bear organs—that was it! He was smuggling contraband out of the Upper Peninsula, not in.

Her imagination took full flight. A Chinese man with an eye patch was the contact. His name was Suk Yung Foo and he’d been sent by his gangster father to an American college to better himself. Instead, he’d met this guy, a former, um, professor…who’d been on the track to full tenure until the…cheating scandal? Embezzlement of research grants?

No. The man had too much sex appeal for his downfall to be anything but nubile young coeds.

Tess shook her head. “How predictable.”

The stranger glanced back at her. “Predictable?”

“Oh.” She blinked. “Why, uh, someone’s misfiled a cookbook. Dust Off Your Bread Machine does not belong beside Nubian Artifacts.”

“You put it there.”

“Did I?” The man must have eyes in the back of his head, but then she’d heard that of crooks.

He shrugged and returned to his reading. For a long moment Tess watched, frozen, as he flipped from illustration to illustration. Then she jammed the bread book onto her cart and wheeled it fast in the opposite direction, her heels clacking on the parquet floor. She slowed when she turned at the end of the row and peered back at him, catching glimpses of him along the aisles as she moved away at a more leisurely pace.

She was being ridiculous. He was a perfectly normal man reading about lighthouses. Alouette’s Gull Rock Lighthouse, situated on the narrow, rocky peninsula that framed one side of the bay, was frequently photographed by tourists, and it had been featured in several travel books. Although the lighthouse was out of commission and not accessible to the public, it was too prominent and exposed to be the base of operations for a smuggling operation.

Even one that operated at night? Alouette rolled up the sidewalks by ten. A herd of zebras could stampede downtown and no one would know until they stepped in the evidence the next morning.

Tess shook her head. Oh, stop it. Get back to your job.

She slipped the cookbook into its proper place, made quick work of shelving the remaining books and returned to the front desk. The stranger was still seated at the study table. If he was doing any sort of serious research, he must have a photographic memory—he hadn’t made a single note.

“Is he a tourist?” whispered Beth Trudell as she moved behind the desk, one hand splayed over her protruding midsection.

“Probably.”

“He doesn’t look like a tourist.”

“No.”

“You’d best stop staring at him and go take charge of the kids. They’re waiting for their story. I can’t promise how patiently.”

With a small groan, Beth eased herself onto a stool. She was twenty-three, married for a year, and presently eight months, one week and three days pregnant, give or take a few hours. She had been Tess’s assistant in one form or another ever since Tess had started working here. That first day, Beth had been a shy adolescent with spindly arms and thick glasses. She’d read Sweet Valley books until closing time and then helped Tess sweep, straighten chairs and water plants. The next day, Tess had introduced the girl to Little Women, Anne of Green Gables and Nancy Drew and asked if she wanted to help out with the new children’s summer-reading program.

“You finished the craft project?” Tess asked idly. Delaying. She really wanted to know what the stranger was up to. Besides, the noise from the adjacent children’s reading room hadn’t escalated to the danger zone yet.

“Six Popsicle-stick planters, all set for repotting the nasturtiums.”

“Only six?”

Beth settled herself more comfortably, wincing a little as she propped her feet on the rungs. “Grady Kujanen smashed his. He did it deliberately, so I didn’t let him make another. We were out of sticks, anyway. Then he sat beneath the table and stared at my belly while he pouted.” Beth chuckled. “Get this. He asked me when I was going to pop.”

“Pop? Where in the world…?”

“I guess he heard it from his dad. Now the children think I’m a champagne bottle. Grady told them that when I go to the hospital the doctor pulls the cork, and voilà—a baby.”

“If only it were that easy,” Tess said.

Beth patted the baby in her belly. She called it Bump. “Yeah.”

“Five more weeks, sweetie.” Beth’s due date had been circled in red on the library calendar ever since they’d administered a drugstore pregnancy test in the ladies’ room one slow Thursday night. Neither having much experience with babies, they’d used every research tool at their disposal to compile a fact sheet for the next nine months. The first fact they’d learned was that “nine months” was a misnomer. Gestation was actually forty weeks. The extra days were making Beth a little crazy.

“Randy refuses to talk in term of weeks, ever since I had that meltdown at the thought of still being pregnant in July. From now on, he says, it’s one day at a time.” Beth wiped her forehead with the back of one wrist. “One hot, sweaty day at a time.”

It was barely eighty outside, but Tess cranked up the fan that whirred from a shelf behind the checkout desk. They didn’t have air-conditioning—no budget. “You look done in, Beth. Why don’t you leave early?”

“Thanks. I’ll take you up on that. But not till the kids are gone. You know how hectic it gets when they’re all checking out at once.” Beth swiveled to face the library proper, which had been fashioned from the ground-floor rooms of a big Victorian house on Timber Avenue, one block from the elementary school and two blocks from downtown bayside Alouette. “And we have our other patrons to keep an eye on,” she added significantly. Her arched eyebrows disappeared behind curly, slightly damp bangs.

Tess shot Mr. Tall, Dark and Mysterious another glance. He was absorbed in his book, but she would have sworn his ears were pricked. Why a conversation about due dates and craft projects would concern a rogue pirate, she had no idea.

A shriek came from the children’s area. Through the open doorway, Tess saw Grady Kujanen raising a picture book over his head. “Take over for me,” she told Beth before hurrying away.

Beth’s eyes slitted as she whispered out of the side of her mouth, “Synchronize your watch. We’ll reconvene in fifteen minutes.”

Tess nodded, although Bump ruined the spy effect Beth was going for. Maybe if she’d been wearing a gabardine suit and a bow tie…

In the children’s room, Tess stepped into the fray and snatched the book out of Grady’s hands before he could bring it down on Sierra Caldwell’s head. The children knew she demanded best behavior, so after she’d admonished Grady they settled down without much complaint, gathering on the bright pillows and beanbags strewn across the carpet of the storytelling nook.

Normally, Tess would have pulled the filmy blue star-sprinkled curtains she’d hung at this end of the room to give the nook a cozy feel, but today she wanted a clear view to the main room of the library. You never knew when a baby might decide to “pop” early, so it paid to be vigilant.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that she could also see the study tables from her position on the storytelling throne, a tufted purple-velvet ottoman trimmed in bobbled fringe. The stranger had set aside the last of his picture books and was paging through a paperback by a local author, Lighthouses of Upper Michigan. Hmm…

Soon Tess had forgotten the suspicious unshaved ex-professor bear-organs smuggler and was absorbed by the story she read to the children, The Princess Who Wished Tomorrow Would Never Come. The group was a good one despite Grady’s tendency to make himself the center of attention. When he’d first started in the reading program that Tess ran three times a week all summer long, his behavior had been much worse—loud, bratty and completely disinterested in books, despite a year of kindergarten. Tess had spoken with his teachers to determine the best course of action, and so far, her subtle efforts to engage the boy’s imagination were working. He’d begun to understand the magic of reading, even though his mother considered the library little more than a convenient baby-sitting service and wasn’t too happy about lugging Grady’s books home with them.

Tess started each session with basic reading-comprehension work, then gave way to Beth for a fun arts and crafts project or mini-outdoor field trip—one day the children started nasturtium seeds, another day they chased butterflies in the library’s flower garden. It gratified Tess that they considered the storybook she read to them at the end of the hour the best treat of all. There were so many good children’s books to choose from, and she always got into the performance, using character voices and facial expressions with a theatrical flair that surprised even herself. Before she’d been dragged into performing with the local theater group a few years back, she hadn’t thought she was the dramatic type.

Not that a little bit of small-town stage experience had changed anything. She was still only Tess Bucek, a librarian with a private life as unremarkable and familiar as a bowl of oatmeal.

“‘The green-winged whippersnapper soared from the sky with a rose in its beak,’” Tess read. She turned the page. “‘Princess Ella Umbrella Pumpkinella Fantabuzella—’” the children singsonged the name with her “‘—took the rose and said…’” Tess pointed at Grady.

The chubby boy went on hands and knees to see the open book she held out. His lower lip stuck out with determination. After a few seconds, he read, “‘Zip-per-zap.’”

“Zipperzap!” Tess agreed. She allowed Grady to select a children’s tattoo from a nearby basket. She always kept a stash of modest prizes like stickers and cartoon-character pencil erasers handy.

“Zipperzap,” sighed Lucy Grant, a shy, delicate five-year-old with translucent skin. Her huge blue eyes shone with pleasure.

“‘Once the magic word was spoken and the rose petals had been flung to the northerly wind,’” Tess went on, finishing up the story with a triumphant flourish, “‘the sun came out from the dark clouds, the flowers blossomed and the creatures of the forest rose from their hundred-years’ sleep.’” She looked up and saw the dark-haired stranger hovering in the doorway, listening to her with an intent expression. “‘Princess Ella Umbrella Pumpkinella, uh, Fantas—’” No, not fantasy.

“Fan-ta-bu-zel-la,” the children recited in unison.

Tess had lost track entirely.

The man saw that he’d disrupted her flow. “I’d like to speak with you after you’re finished,” he said in a low, serious voice that made her nape prickle. He walked away before she could respond.

Tess swallowed. What was that about? Why did she feel so remarkably different?

The kids were clamoring for the ending. Tess focused on the page, illustrated with a green-eyed, freckle-faced princess in a pair of bib overalls. “‘And then the, um, princess said, Even though today is beautiful, I know that tomorrow may be even better.’”

HE COULD WAIT, Tess decided. Parents were arriving to pick up the children and there were gluey planters to be shown off and books to be checked out. When the library had cleared out finally, Lucy Grant was left behind. Her single dad, Evan Grant, was a gym teacher and basketball coach at the high school. Summers, he picked up an extra paycheck with a local builder and couldn’t always get off work to deliver Lucy to her baby-sitter’s house. Usually either Tess or Beth ducked out to take her there.

Not today. Tess put Lucy’s stick planter on the windowsill to dry and settled the girl at one of the child-size tables with the second book in the Princess Ella series. Today, she’d call Evan at work. Beth would have volunteered, but her house was in the opposite direction—a long enough walk for a pregnant woman without adding a detour. And Tess couldn’t leave the library unattended, whether or not there was a smuggler on the premises. Lucy would have to wait for her father.

Tess went back to the main desk to call Evan. The stranger loitered near the magazine rack, gazing out the window at the flower garden. Maybe he was conducting a surveillance of traffic patterns. Little did he know that on Timber Avenue, there was no traffic to surveil.

After hanging up, Tess turned to Beth. “Go on home. Evan can take a break, so he’s coming for Lucy.”

Beth smiled tiredly. “Good. I don’t want to waddle any farther than I have to.”

“You can take my car if the walk is too much for you today.” Tess had been urging her assistant to quit her part-time position for the last few weeks of her pregnancy, but Beth said that waiting out the time at home alone in her tiny apartment, staring at her belly button and the movements of Bump beneath it, would drive her bananas.

“No, my doctor says I should keep walking.” Beth groaned as she hoisted herself off the stool. “I’d like to strap a watermelon to his gut and send him around the block ten times. See what he thinks then.”

Tess patted her consolingly. “Pour yourself a cold drink and put your feet up as soon as you get home.”

“I’ll have to pry my shoes off first. My feet and ankles have swollen like bread dough.”

Tess offered her arm as they walked to the front door, a heavy slab of mahogany inset with leaded glass. She’d left it open to the June sunshine. “Randy’s going to be home tonight, isn’t he?” Beth’s husband drove a bakery delivery truck and was sometimes away overnight because his route was so sizable. From one end of the Upper Peninsula to the other was more than three hundred miles, and he delivered to northern Wisconsin as well.

“He promised. His boss even promised that Randy wouldn’t have to do any more overnighters, till Bump arrives, anyway.”

“Good.” Tess gave Beth a gentle squeeze. “You take care. Call me if anything happens. Or doesn’t. Call me if you just want to talk.”

Beth glanced into the main room of the library, which opened off the small entry hall and had been formed by knocking out walls between the house’s formal parlor and second sitting room. “You call me as soon as he leaves,” Beth whispered. She jerked her head at the lingering stranger. “I want to find out what’s up with him.”

“He’s probably going to ask me for directions to the lighthouse. Maybe he’s a photographer.”

Beth’s nose crinkled. “Maybe, maybe not.”

“Or a reincarnated lighthouse keeper bedeviled by nightmares he can’t explain.”

“Now you’re talking. But I bet you could come up with an even better scenario if you tried.”

Tess laughed. Her assistant knew her too well. “Go home, Beth.”

Beth went, waddling with one hand pressed to the small of her back and the other making a phone shape at her ear. “Call me,” she mouthed.

Tess waved Beth away, smiling to hide her unmollified worry over Randy’s late hours. His boss wasn’t as accommodating as he might have been, but there was no helping it. The Trudells were struggling to make ends meet. Beth’s parents, an older couple who’d had their only daughter late in life, had recently retired in Florida. They planned to return soon for an extended stay, to help Beth out with the baby, but until then, Randy and Tess were the young mother-to-be’s main support system. Aside from any number of do-gooders in the community who would be glad to pitch in and help in case of emergency.

Although the two women were primarily best friends, there were times Tess felt like Beth’s older sister, even her mother. If it was possible to be a mother when you’d never given birth yourself.

Tess frowned, spreading her hands over her flat tummy. Eleven years ago, she was on her way to a life just like Beth’s when—

Tess brushed off the sad memory. Dismissing the tragedy that had shaped her life had become easier with practice. And distance.

She walked into the main room, checking first on Lucy. The girl, a dreamy, inward child, not unlike Tess at that age, was completely absorbed in the book.

Tess’s second glance went to the make-believe pirate. “Sorry for the delay. How can I help you, Mr…?”

He came forward, not as tall as she’d assumed but still many inches past her five-two. Tall enough to make her tilt her chin up when she looked into his clear hazel-brown eyes.

“Connor Reed,” he said, offering his hand.

“Tess Bucek.” His hand was large and cool and dry. Hers was small and warm and moist. And they fit together just fine, for a brief moment that made her feel as if her cells were rushing like a warm river toward him. He let go then, and she blinked and said in a far too girlish voice, “Hi.”

His eyebrows drew down. “Hi.”

She said, “Connor Reed,” mulling over the name. It was naggingly familiar. “Are you from around here?”

“Not really.”

“I feel like I know you from somewhere….”

His features tightened. “I used to spend summers here, with my grandfather.”

“Did you?” She tried to picture Connor Reed as a boy and no bells rang. Summer people. They came and went, very few of them leaving a mark except for the trash they threw off their boats, the cash in the tills of local businesses and the rising prices of shoreline property. Not many of them ventured into the library with the distraction of sun-soaked days at the beach beckoning so near. Lake Superior was practically lapping at her doorstep.