Whispers and Lies

Her face went white again. “Oh.”

“Come with me to Nancy’s place,” Will said. “She’ll put you up.”

“No, that’s too much for her, with the wedding and all. I’ll go to a hotel.”

“You will not. You shouldn’t be alone. You’ve had a shock.”

“I’m fine now, Will,” she insisted stubbornly.

“Bull. You’re running on empty and you need to collapse someplace safe.”

With that, he took out his cell phone, contacted his sister, briefly explained what had happened and then handed the phone to Lou. Adjusting the kitten in the crook of her elbow, she put the phone to her ear. Whatever his sister said to her made her smile, then nod. “Okay, okay, you’ve convinced me.”

As she gave him back his phone, she said, “If I don’t come over, she’ll never speak to me again. I gave her enough grief refusing to be a bridesmaid, so I’m treading on thin ice as it is.”

Nancy Jamison was tall and bony, not beautiful, but the kind of woman who would grow more attractive with age. She had the Jamison dark hair and pronounced bone structure, but her eyes were light blue instead of green like Will’s. When she threw open the door and opened her arms, Lou went right into them, and, just like that, she was on the verge of tears again. She really had thought she was okay, had thought Will was fussing needlessly, but it turned out he was right.

He stood behind her, carrying everything—her overnight case, the cat carrier, litter box and litter. He wouldn’t hear of her lifting anything.

“You poor thing,” Nancy said, patting her on the back.

Lou withdrew from the hug. “I didn’t want to bother you so close to the wedding.”

“Stop it,” she said sternly, ushering her into the same house Lou had considered a second home for twenty years. As far as the eye could see, there were white boxes of all sizes opened, half-opened, still sealed. Wrapping paper was strewn all over the floors. Wedding gifts were taking over the place.

Will came in, closing the door behind them.

“You’re my friend. Of course you can stay,” Nancy said. “As long as you want. The place will be empty after the wedding while we’re on our honeymoon and my brother goes back to Washington.”

“Just tonight, thanks.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Oscar, obviously just awakened from a snooze, wandered into the foyer from the kitchen. The minute the pug saw and smelled the kitty box, he began to bark.

“Hush,” Nancy said.

“Oscar, behave,” Lou said sternly, and the sniffling, snorting dog stopped barking and backed off, his head lowered as though his feelings had been deeply hurt.

“What’s all the ruckus?”

Nancy’s fiancé Bob wandered from down the hall, dressed in an old robe, his glasses perched at an odd angle on his nose and his hair mussed. “Oh, hi, Lou,” he said with one of his sweet smiles.

“Bob, I’m so sorry I woke you up.”

“Go back to bed, honey.” Nancy shooed him away.

“Really?”

“Really.”

Nodding, he smiled one more time, turned right around and walked back down the hall.

Lou was shown to the guest room, just off the service porch connected to the kitchen. Then Nancy left her to join her brother, while Lou set up a little area for Anthony. She poured food in a bowl, gave him water, filled the litter box, and patted the sweet little thing until he stopped quaking.

As she was shutting the door behind her, she heard Nancy’s voice in the kitchen. “Imagine my surprise to hear that you and Lou had been out together.”

“Yeah. Funny, huh.”

“Strange, really. I never heard a word about the two of you being, you know, friendly.”

“There is no ‘two of us,’ Nan. When I took Oscar in this morning, I invited her to dinner tonight. You were busy with Bob and the wedding, and she’s good company. No biggie.”

Lou barely had time to be disappointed by Will’s answer before she heard Nancy reply, “Well, it’s just strange, you know, considering how she’s always—”

Lou so did not want her to finish that sentence; Nancy knew all about Lou’s long-ago crush on her brother, and Lou would be mortified to hear it revealed. Closing the bedroom door louder than necessary, she joined them in the kitchen, saying, “Poor Anthony, he’s totally traumatized. We found him in a Dumpster a couple of weeks ago. Heaven knows how he got there. And then he had to be isolated for a while, while he got over a bad wheeze. And he’s cross-eyed, poor baby, so no one seemed to want to adopt him. Then just last week, I decided to take him upstairs to live with me. And now this. Too much shuffling and moving around. It will be a long time until he can settle down and trust anyone.”

Nancy, who stood, hip propped against the stove, indicated the round wooden table in the corner. “Sit. I’m making tea. You want some?”

“Yes, please.” Lou sank into the soft cushion covering the chair, then gazed around, feeling thoroughly at home. All the warmth in this room had been created by Will and Nancy’s late mom, Lorna Jamison, a devoted homemaker and terrific cook, who had died two years after her husband’s untimely death in a railroad crash.

Nancy had not inherited her mother’s propensity for cozy homemaking; instead, the kitchen counters were strewn with books, file folders, old copies of the Courier. A pile of take-out pizza boxes were stacked on an old wicker chair in the corner.

As Lou turned to the other occupant at the table, he stood. “Excuse me for just a moment, will you?” Will said. “I need to make a couple of phone calls.”

After Lou had filled Nancy in on the break-in details, she managed to defer any questions about her evening with Will by asking how the wedding plans were going, which opened up a much more pleasant topic of conversation. As they sipped their tea, and Lou felt the hot liquid reaching the cold places and warming them up, Nancy explained that there was some kind of last-minute problem with the flowers. As the editor of a paper, Nancy was used to putting out fires and improvising solutions, so she was taking it all in stride; Bob, her fiancé, wasn’t. He wanted it all to be perfect, Nancy told Lou, and they both agreed that he was, by nature, both more detail-oriented and more romantic than Nancy.

“So what’s up with you and my brother?” Nancy asked finally, but Lou was rescued from having to answer by Will’s reentrance. Announcing she was thoroughly frazzled and exhausted, Nancy said she was going to bed. She gave Lou a quick conspiratorial wink as she left the room, which made her deeply uncomfortable. There was nothing “up” between her and Will.

But he’d kissed her tonight, hadn’t he? So maybe it wasn’t entirely absurd.

And what if he did kiss you? the voice of reason asked her. It was just that. One kiss.

A really nice kiss.

Which he’d broken off pretty quickly.

As he sat down, Will’s cell phone shrilled. He removed it from his pocket, flipped it open, announced, “Will Jamison here.” If he’d been expecting a specific call, this wasn’t it. Lou watched his face as, surprised, he said, “Oh. Hi.”

It was a woman. Lou knew it immediately, from the way he angled his body away from her just slightly and lowered his voice. “Fine. How about you?” He listened again, turned even farther away from her and said, “Yeah.”

Lou tried not to pay attention, really she did, but her imagination easily filled in the blanks. “How are you?” had been followed by “I miss you” and then “When are you getting back?”

Just then, Will said, “Monday.”

Yup, right on the money, Lou thought, and felt a piercing stab of jealousy. She immediately called herself all kinds of names for even feeling that way. Will had an entire life back in Washington she was not part of. He could even be serious about someone, for all she knew. He hadn’t mentioned that little fact, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t so.

She felt her heart sinking at the prospect of Will with someone he really cared about.

No. Not fair. Was she to spend her entire life mooning over a man who would never choose her?

But he kissed me.

Will hung up, smiled. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said, brightly, then yawned. It was totally unexpected, as was the next one. And like that, she remembered: she was plain wiped out.

“I have to go to sleep, Will. I’ve been up since four.”

“You mentioned that earlier. Why?”

“We had a little rescue operation this morning. A feral mama cat and six little ones living under a house. The only way we could get them was to surround and surprise them in the dark.”

“Did it work?”

“Somewhat. We got two of the kittens and the mama. You saw her today.”

“Ah, the furious feline.” He smiled his crooked smile and, despite herself, her heartbeat kicked up a notch. “Make that the furious, frantic, feral feline. Kind of has a ring to it.”

“The very one.”

“What about the other kittens?”

“They got away.”

“What will happen to them?”

“They weren’t weaned yet, so most likely they’ll die, if they’re not eaten by a predator first.”

Will was startled, not by what Lou said but by the way she said it. Matter-of-factly, with just a hint of sorrow.

“God, that’s horrible,” he said.

“Yes, it is.” He watched as she tried to stifle another yawn. “It’s also the way nature works—the strong and the cunning survive. I do what I can, Will. It’s not much.”

She rose from the table and took her cup over to the sink. Will watched her small body, the dejectedness in her shoulders. She was so tired and so sad; he wanted to comfort her, as Nancy had done at the front door. Put his arms around her. Hug her.

And not just as a friend.

Man, this was strange. The call just now from Barbara—the financial adviser to a prominent member of the House—had reminded him of the kind of woman he was always attracted to. Independent and self-sufficient, with a high-powered career. Worldly, sophisticated, somewhat self-centered and somewhat cynical, like him.

Sure Lou had a career she loved, and she was both independent and self-sufficient. But she was a generous, giving soul who wore her heart on her sleeve. At her core, she was a nester, a nurturer. He’d always preferred women who were neither. It was easier that way to avoid emotional attachments.

Even so, there it was, that attraction he felt for her. Lou represented life. She cared, and cared deeply, about animals and people and all living things. Sure, she covered it up with a quick wit and occasional sarcasm, and sure, there were old scars and recent pain, but the woman was a definite survivor. Like a plant in the presence of the sun, she always sought the light.

That light was damned attractive to someone dwelling in the dark, as he had been till recently.

But it wasn’t only what she represented; it was Lou herself. He liked her, apart from anything else. Which was why he reminded himself to keep hands off for the rest of his time here in Susanville. He didn’t need any involvements, especially with a woman who wouldn’t treat it casually and whose heart he would break. Will knew himself all too well. He might have hated his father, the founder and editor of the town’s single newspaper, for his workaholic nature which kept him from his family. And in his determination not to follow in his father’s footsteps, he might have run away from working on the paper.

But with maturity, he had come to understand that he was just like the old man—tunnel-visioned and driven. Career came first. So he had decided he could avoid hurting others—avoid making them suffer the same destiny as his own family had suffered—by never getting too involved with a woman, thus avoiding the possibility of a family of his own.

At this point in his life, he might have lost his taste for reporting on the world’s pain and violence, but he hadn’t lost his ambition, his need to get ahead, his hunger to be more. It was what drove him, gave him energy and a reason to get up every morning.

He rose, walked over to Lou at the sink. As he gazed into the sad, scared, tired brown eyes of Lou McAndrews—a woman he’d known for years but felt he had met today for the first time—he took her hand, squeezed it comfortingly and smiled. “You go to bed now, get some sleep. You’re safe here. I’ll see you in the morning.”

After a quick moment of hesitation, she nodded and left the room. Will sat some more at the kitchen table, thinking.

Mostly about the calls he’d made earlier from his bedroom, following through on that niggling little notion that wouldn’t go away. He’d punched in Lincoln’s number at his D.C. condo. When no one picked up, he’d left a message. Then he’d tried his Florida home and his cell phone. No answer at either. Will left messages everywhere, asking that Linc call him ASAP. That it was important.

He checked his watch. Midnight. Lincoln had always been reachable before, but he might be out, carousing with buddies or with a woman, might have his cell phone turned off.

Well, he’d done all he could do. It was time for him to go to bed.

Will tossed and turned all night, thinking about not getting through to Lincoln, and going in and out of dreams about Lou, who was spending the night just down the hall in the guest bedroom, probably cuddled up with a small, black cat.

Will wished he were there in its stead.

Chapter 4

Saturdays were always busy at the clinic and this one was no exception, beginning with euthanasia on a twenty-three-year-old, completely worn-out, part Siamese, part alley cat named Rose Tiger. After comforting the cat’s owner, Lou went on to caring for a terrier-schnauzer mix with mange, a Manx who’d been bitten by a spider and a terrified golden retriever who had gotten a chicken bone stuck crosswise between her upper teeth.

She was cleaning out the wounds of a cat fight victim when she was called urgently to the phone. Leaving the animal in Alonzo’s capable care, she went into her office and picked up the receiver.

“Lou?”

“Oh, hi, Nancy, what’s up?”

“Sorry to bother you like this but I have a huge favor to ask you.”

“Anything, you know that.”

“Molly is sick. Can you believe it? She has chicken pox, poor thing. Never had it as a kid and she hugged her nephew and the rest is history.”

“That’s awful,” Lou commiserated.

“Anyway, she’s my maid of honor tomorrow and she won’t be able to do it.”

A feeling of dread came over her. “Yes?”

“Please, please, please, will you do it? You were my first choice, remember? But that was right after your mom died, and of course you were in no shape to do anything like that. Now it’s a couple of months later and, well, I really, really need a maid of honor.”

“But what will I wear?”

“That’s just it. It works out great. You can wear Molly’s dress.”

“But she’s tiny.”

“So are you. I mean, not to be insensitive, I know it’s because of your mom and all, but Lou, you would have no trouble fitting into her dress now, trust me. I can get it to you today and Mrs. Crump from the cleaners says if there are any last-minute alterations, she’ll do them tonight. Please Lou.”

Tiny? She was tiny? There was a narrow mirror on one of the walls of her office—why, she had no idea—and Lou gazed at herself in it. It was true. As always, she was pretty short, but now she was also pretty thin. There were cheekbones where there had been none. No more plumpness around the jawline. Her neck looked longer now.

Tiny.

Lou found herself semipleased with the word, but also not. Tiny was a word that lacked, well, substance.

“Lou?”

“Yes? Oh, sorry. Of course I’ll do it.”

There was a huge sigh on the other end of the line. “Thank you, bless you. You are free tonight, aren’t you? I mean, you’ll have to attend the wedding rehearsal and the bridal dinner afterward, and that’s tonight. Yes?”

“Yes.”

Another relieved sigh. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me. So, will you be coming back to my place this afternoon? Oh, no, I can’t believe I haven’t asked you how you are. Have you been upstairs yet? Did the fingerprint guy come? Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine, Nancy, really. Yeah, he was there and he’s all done. He came downstairs and took my prints, too—he says for now they only found one primary set, mine we figure, and older, fainter traces of another, probably Mom’s. Whoever broke in, they were pros.”

“But how awful, to have your house broken into. So will you spend the night back at your place then?”

“I don’t know. I want to see what it’s like upstairs first.”

“Come here, okay? Really.”

Another night spent under the same roof with Will, sharing a bathroom, smelling his shaving soap? “I’ll have to let you know.”

“Well, either way, you’ll have the dress later this afternoon. And Molly wants you to know that the last time she tried it on was a couple of weeks ago and she doesn’t think you can catch chicken pox from a fabric after two weeks.”

Lou chuckled. “Tell her thanks and I already had all the usual childhood diseases.”

After she hung up, she gazed in the mirror again. Tiny. Petite. Feminine. There were lots of men who liked those adjectives when they applied to their women. Was Will one of them? He’d found her attractive, he’d said. Would he still say the same thing if she were her usual, not-tiny self?

He kissed me.

And so what? she told herself sternly, as she had been all day. He’d been honest with her, found her attractive—for all she knew, he probably found all women attractive—but didn’t want to start something that had nowhere to go.

Before getting back to her patients, she snuck one last look at herself. Yes, she most definitely was not the same old Lou McAndrews. And however ambivalent she might feel about the change in herself, at least now she would be able to do her best friend a favor—wear a dress that actually fit and maybe even look good in it. Hey, after opening her house and her arms to her last night, whatever Nancy needed, Lou was here to make sure she got it.

Will’s bedroom had last been updated in high school. At that point, as he’d sprouted up nearly five inches in one year, the twin bed he’d slept in while growing up had been traded in for a full one. There were large posters of Aerosmith and Bruce Springsteen on one wall, a movie poster from Top Gun on another; along a third stretched a huge banner for the Susanville Sluggers, his baseball team. The shelves of two narrow bookcases were filled with schoolbooks, some fiction and a lot of history and biography. There were CDs and tapes, even a few old LPs, although the needle on his record player had long since gone south.

At the moment, Will was pounding away on his laptop, which was sitting on the small corner desk in his bedroom, trying to sculpt some of his notes together into a loose first draft. But he was missing too much information.

He glanced at his cell phone, now recharging on the corner of his dresser. He’d tried Lincoln again this morning, at all three numbers, and there’d been no answer. He’d also tried a few other contact numbers for him—two ex-wives, his daughter Gretchen, a drinking buddy. No one knew where Linc was.

For a brief moment, Will considered calling the man’s brother, but the last time the senator and Will had spoken, Jackson DeWitt had let him know he wasn’t thrilled about this article that would draw more attention to his brother and, by extension, to himself. From what he could tell, the senator both cared deeply about and was exasperated by his younger brother.

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