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“Charlie’s been sick, right?” she said.
“That’s right!” Deedee said eagerly.
Brendan’s expression just became more grim.
“You said you’d send him energy,” Deedee reminded her. “You said to send money. I sent fifty dollars.”
“Fifty dollars?” Brendan snapped. “Deedee! You said you sent a little money.”
“In terms of what my cat is worth to me, that is a small amount.” The woman gave him a look that was equal parts sulk and steel.
“So there you have it,” Brendan said to Nora, exasperated. “If you play your cards right, she’ll sign over her house to you. You won’t need the support of the Hansen Community Betterment Committee. Is that how this operation of yours works?”
“Of course not!” Nora said, feeling the heat rising in her cheeks. “I’m sure it was just a mistake. I must have thought the money was a donation.”
She tried to keep her voice steady, but was not sure she succeeded.
“Uh-huh.” He sounded cynical, and rightfully so.
Nora wanted to whirl on Luke and shake him. She had never even raised her voice to him, but their whole future was at stake here. And worse, if he had sent that letter, and taken that money—and who else could it possibly be?—he had stolen from a vulnerable old woman. How could he? Who was he becoming? And why couldn’t she stop it?
Again she felt the weight of responsibility for her choices. Karen would have never entrusted her to raise her nephew alone. She would have been able to predict this catastrophe coming.
With great care, Nora kept herself from looking askance at her nephew.
“Let’s get in out of the rain,” she suggested, trying to keep her voice steady. Because he had given her his jacket, the rain had soaked through Brendan’s shirt, which was now practically transparent.
She was aware she didn’t really want Brendan Grant, with his bristling masculine energy and wet, clinging shirt, invading her house. She’d been here only a little while, but it had quickly become a sanctuary to her. On the other hand, she desperately needed to buy some time, to take Luke aside and figure out what he had done.
And fix it.
Yet again.
But a glance at the unyielding features of the man who had made her feel momentarily so safe told her this might not be so easy to fix.
The house was not what Brendan expected of a charlatan’s house. There were no crystals dangling in the door wells and no clusters of herbs hanging upside down from their stems. There was no cloying scent of incense.
“Lovely,” Deedee breathed with approval, standing in the doorway, taking it in.
“Disappointing,” Brendan said.
In fact, he found the house was cozy and clean. An uneasiness crawled along his neck as they passed through a living room where a pair of love seats the color of melted butter faced each other across a coffee table where some of those yellow roses from the yard floated in a clear glass bowl.
“Disappointing?” Nora asked.
“No black cat. No cauldron on the hearth.”
Nora shot him a look. She really was the cutest little thing. Again he had that feeling of coming awake. He didn’t want to notice her, but how could he not? Her hair was a mess, standing straight up, strawberry-blonde dandelion fluff. Her eyes were huge in a dainty mudstreaked face. She looked more frightened now than when he had first found her.
The scam revealed. But her shock seemed genuine, and so did her distress.
“Look,” Nora said in a defensive undertone, “I take in sick and abandoned animals. I don’t claim to be a healer.”
Her nephew snorted at that, and she shot him a glare that he was completely oblivious to.
Deedee, deaf anyway, hadn’t even heard.
“As for black cats and cauldrons, I certainly don’t do witchcraft!”
Her muddy, soaked clothes, and his jacket, swam around her, and he guessed she would be determined not to remove her coat and reveal the pajamas underneath.
He wasn’t sure why. The pajama bottoms, which he could see, were filthy, but underneath the mud they were plaid. Utilitarian rather than sexy.
They came to the kitchen, and Nora turned on a light to reveal old cabinets painted that same cheerful shade of yellow as her sofas and roses. The floor was old hardwood planking that gleamed with patina. He smelled fresh bread.
There was a jar full of cookies on the counter, and notes and pictures were held by magnets to the front of a vintage fridge. There was a wood-burning stove in one corner, and an old, scarred oak table covered with schoolbooks.
The uneasiness returned. He thought of those wonders of granite and steel that people wanted for their kitchens these days, that he designed, and suddenly he knew what the uneasiness was. They somehow had all missed the mark.
For all the awards that decorated the walls of his office, he had never achieved this. A feeling.
He shook it off, looked back at Nora. The caption under her high school yearbook picture had probably read “Least likely to bamboozle an old woman out of her money.”
But somebody had. The nephew? The kid practically had a neon sign over his head that flashed Guilty, but on the other hand, didn’t all kids that age look like that? Slinky and defensive and as if they had just finished committing a crime?
What surprised Brendan was that he was interested at all in who did it. And if it was her nephew, to what lengths she would go to protect him.
But that’s what happened when you came alive. Life, the interactions of people, their relationships and motivations interested you.
It was a wound waiting to happen, he warned himself.
“Put the cat there.” Nora pointed to a kitchen island, a marble top fastened to solid wooden legs, and he set the cat carrier down, surreptitiously checking the bottom for any dampness that might have transferred to the seat of his new car.
He knew it said something about the kind of person he was that he was relieved to find none.
“He’s been very sick,” Deedee said. “Just like I told you in the letter.”
“Maybe you could remind me what you wrote in your letter.”
In the light of the kitchen, Brendan could see a knob growing alarmingly on Nora’s forehead. She was wet and covered in mud.
And Brendan Grant was surprised there was a part of him that still knew the right thing to do. And was prepared to do it.
“The cat will have to wait,” he heard himself say firmly, in the tone of voice he used on the construction site when a carpenter was insisting something couldn’t be done the way he wanted it done.
And the people in the room reacted about the same way. Deedee swung her head and glared at him. Nora looked none too happy, either.
“I want to take a look at you,” he insisted. “If you don’t need a trip to the emergency ward, you certainly need a shower and a change of clothes before you check out the cat.”
“I can have a look at the cat first.”
So she wanted what he wanted. For this to be quick. Look at the cat. Tell them what they all already knew about Charlie’s prospects for a future. Of course, what they wanted parted ways at finding out who was guilty of taking money from Deedee, and what the consequences were going to be.
Still, handled properly, the whole drama could unfold and conclude in about two minutes, in and out.
Heavy on the out part. He wanted to head home and go back to bed.
His old life—that cave that was comforting in its lack of intensity, in its palette of grays—beckoned to him. But it seemed to him that nothing was going to go quite as he wanted.
Which he hated in and of itself. Because one thing Brendan Grant wanted, in a world that had already scorned his need for it, was control.
“You first, then the cat,” he told Nora.
Deedee, in typical fashion, appeared annoyed that her agenda was being moved to the back of the line. But Nora looked annoyed, too. It told him a lot about her when she folded her arms over his coat.
Independent. Possibly newly so. No one was going to tell her what to do. Brendan wondered again what the pajamas she was so determined to hide looked like.
“You already told me you aren’t a doctor,” Nora said.
“Doctor or not, a head injury is nothing to take lightly. They can be sneaky and deadly. It will just take me a minute to look at you.”
“I’m fine.”
“Deadly?” The boy got a panicky pinched look around his eyes. “Let him look at you!”
Nora, seeing his distress, surrendered, sinking onto a kitchen chair with ill grace.
“That was quite a hit to your head. Do you think you were knocked out?” Brendan moved close, brushed her hair away from the rapidly growing bump.
Every part of her seemed to be either wet or covered with mud. How was it her hair felt like silk?
“I’m fine.”
“That’s not what I asked,” he said mildly.
“I don’t think I was knocked out.” She offered this grumpily.
“But you can’t say for sure?”
She didn’t want to admit it, but Brendan could tell she didn’t remember, which was probably not a good sign.
Nora knew what date it was, her full name and her birthday. He noted that she was twenty-six, though she looked younger. He also noted, annoyed, that he was interested in her age.
And apparently her marital status. There was no ring on her finger, no signs—large shoes, men’s magazines, messes—that would indicate there was any male besides the boy in residence.
Brendan hated that he was awake enough to notice those things, to wonder at her history, what had brought her and her nephew to this remote corner of British Columbia.
Doing his best to detach, he asked more questions. She remembered what had happened right before she was knocked down and right after, though she did not remember precisely what had knocked her down. She could follow the movement of his finger with her eyes.
“You seem fine,” he finally decided, but he felt uneasy. A concussion really was nothing to fool around with.
“She is fine,” Deedee snapped. “Meanwhile, Charlie could be expiring.”
“I’ll just have a quick look at the cat,” Nora said.
“He’s lasted this long. I’m sure he can wait another five minutes. you need to go have a shower and put on something dry.”
“Are you always this bossy?”
He ignored her. “If you feel dizzy or if you vomit, or feel like you’re going to be sick, you need to tell me right away. Or Luke after I leave. You may have to get to the hospital yet tonight.”
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