Stranger in the Moonlight (15 page)

“Have relatives?” she filled in for him. “Yes I do. Rather a lot of them, actually. My son is your age. I’ll e-mail you what I have,” she added and for the first time ever, she hung up first.

Travis closed his phone and stared at it for a moment. This was a day for surprises! Kim was about to accept a marriage proposal and his faithful right-hand man, Penny, had a son Travis’s age.

At the moment he thought of returning to New York and going back to destroying people’s lives. It played less havoc with his emotions.

He got out of Kim’s car and wasn’t sure what to do. Go inside and talk to her? About what? Ask her to give up her boyfriend in case she and Travis felt something for each other and maybe someday he’d sort out his life and they might possibly get together? Not exactly something any female would accept. Certainly not one like Kim who’d known what she wanted since she was a kid. She was making jewelry at eight and at twenty-six she was still doing it.

“And I haven’t decided—” he said aloud, but he didn’t want to finish that statement. He saw that Kim had turned the lights on in her garage, which meant that she was working. He didn’t like to be disturbed when he was working, so maybe she didn’t either. Besides, he didn’t know what to say to her.

He walked around the house to get to the guesthouse and went to bed.

Seven

Travis had a
sleepless night, and when he awoke the next morning, Kim had already gone to work. His car, the old BMW Penny had bought for him, was in the driveway. He wanted to see Kim. But if he did see her, he didn’t know what he’d say. His system was still shocked at the news that she had a boyfriend. A “serious” boyfriend.

Without thinking what he was doing, Travis got into his car and started driving. His first impulse was to do something physical. That’s what he did when his father demanded too much of him. Climb, run, drive, ski, surf, skate. It didn’t matter what he did as long as it left him too tired to think.

But he didn’t drive into the preserve, didn’t seek out a lake or a cliff. Instead, he found himself pulling into the parking lot of Joe Layton’s hardware store.

He sat in the car, looking at the brick front and wondering what the hell he was doing there. When someone opened the car door, he wasn’t surprised to see Joe.

“You’re just in time. I need to check inventory. You open the boxes, pull the stuff out, and I’ll mark it off on the papers.”

“I need to . . .” Travis couldn’t think of anyplace he needed to be. “Sure. But I warn you that I don’t know a saw from a hammer.”

“I do, so we’ll be fine.” Joe held the door open while Travis got his long body out. “Yesterday you looked happy. Now you look like the world came crashing down on you. Kim throw you out?”

Travis wasn’t used to revealing his thoughts and certainly not his feelings to people, and he had no intention of starting. But maybe unloading boxes of tools would help him release some energy.

“So she dumps
it on me that she’s got a boyfriend,” Travis said. It was four hours later and he was covered in sweat, grime, and those plastic foam packing beans that someone was going to hell for inventing. Travis had told Joe the story of how he and Kim had met as children, and one thing had led to another until he was telling much more than he’d intended to.

While he talked he had single-handedly unloaded what seemed to be hundreds of cartons and crates of tools and supplies. That there were no shelves to put them on didn’t seem to bother Joe Layton in the least. But then he just sat in a big leather chair with a clipboard and checked off whatever Travis opened. Joe had let his disgust be known when Travis didn’t know a Phillips screwdriver from a flat head.

“My daughter knows—” Joe started again. According to him, his daughter could run the world.

“Yeah, well I know how to hire a mechanic to keep the machines running,” Travis had at last snapped. That seemed to release something inside him and in the next minute he was talking about Kim.

“I don’t get it,” he said as he pulled some electrical tool out of a box. It looked like a plastic wombat.

“Router,” Joe said. “Look in there for the bits.”

Travis bent over into the box, foam beans sticking in his hair and wiggling their way down into his T-shirt. He couldn’t help thinking of the Frankenstein movie. “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

“What don’t you get?” Joe asked.

“I came to this town to see Kim. We were great together as kids. I mean, she was just a little girl and I was close to puberty, but still . . . I helped her with her jewelry. I wonder if she’d have that shop of hers now if I hadn’t—”

“Liar!” Joe said loudly.

Travis pulled his head out of the carton. Packing beans stuck out all over him. “I beg your pardon.”

“You came here to see your mother about me.”

Travis’s mouth opened, but no words came out as he stared at Joe.

“Don’t look so surprised. You look like my Lucy, talk like her. Did you two think I was so stupid that I wouldn’t see the resemblance?”

“I . . . We . . .”

“You want to check me out,” Joe said. “It’s what a good son would do. Lucy is a prize worth protecting. But I warn you, boy, if you tell her that I know who you are I’ll show you what a chain saw can do.”

Travis blinked a few times. His mother had made him swear not to tell Joe about her, and now Joe wanted Travis not to tell her that he knew.

“You find those bits yet?” Joe growled.

“No . . .” Travis said softly, still staring.

“Then get busy!” Joe said. “You expect
me
to look for them?”

Travis bent back into the carton, found two more boxes, and pulled them out. When he came up, he looked at Joe in speculation. Where did they go from here? he wondered.

Joe marked off the items Travis held up. “So you came here to see if your mom had gone crazy when she said she wanted to marry some nobody that owned a hardware store.”

Since that was pretty much the truth, Travis gave a curt nod.

“And you thought you might as well see Kim, since you were in the same town.”

“I saw Kim first,” Travis said, feeling defensive as he cut open another carton.

“Only because the wedding was going on and you got sidetracked.”

“I told you too much,” Travis muttered.

“What was that?” Joe asked.

Travis turned to him. “I told you too much. You know too much. You
see
too much.”

Joe chuckled. “That’s because I raised two kids on my own. The things I went through with my daughter! Joey was no problem. When he started staying in the bathroom too long I handed him some condoms. I didn’t have to tell him anything. But Jecca! She fought me every inch of the way. So who’s your dad?”

Travis caught himself before he blurted out the answer. Could he trust this man he barely knew? But there was something about Joe that engendered trust. The expression “salt of the earth” had been created just for him.

“Randall Maxwell,” Travis said.

For a second, Joe looked shocked, scared, impressed, horrified. But then he recovered himself. “That explains everything,” he said. “So you came here to see if the New Jersey guy was after your mom’s money.”

“More or less. She’s still married to him.” Travis looked hard into Joe’s eyes. “The divorce is going to be brutal. You think you can handle that?”

“If I get Lucy all to myself in the end, yeah, I can handle that.”

Travis didn’t try to contain his smile. “I’m a lawyer and—”

“And here I was beginning to actually
like
you.”

Travis groaned. “Don’t start on me and no lawyer jokes. I’ve heard them all. How did we go from my problems to yours?”

“It started with you lying to me. You came to see your mother, not Kim. You left that girl alone for all those years, then you came back here for something else, accidently saw the girl you left behind, and now you’re whining because she has a boyfriend she might marry. What did you expect? That she would stay a virgin and wait for you? You got any brothers or sisters?”

“No to every question. What is this thing? The egg of some extinct species?”

“Orbital sander. You didn’t expect Kim to wait for you?”

“No I didn’t, but then I did know—” He bent back into the carton to pull out sandpaper disks.

“Did know what?”

“A bit about her life.”

“You’ve been stalking her?” Joe asked, his voice full of horror.

Travis refused to answer that. It would take too much explaining and he didn’t want to have to defend himself. “When are you going to get shelves?”

“They’re in those big boxes over there and you’re going to put them up.”

“No, I’m not,” Travis said. “If you need help and can’t afford it, I’ll hire—”

“With Maxwell’s money?”

“I have my own,” Travis said, glaring at him. “Where’d you get the money to buy all this?”

“Thirty years of hard work—and a mortgage on my house in New Jersey. Not that it’s any of your business. If you’re so in love with Kim, why are you here with me now? Why aren’t you courting her?”

“Should I be making her do back bends in public?” Travis asked, his eyes narrowed.

Joe grinned. “Heard about that, did you? Lucy can pole dance. I tell you, she can—”

“Don’t!” Travis said sternly.

“Understood,” Joe said. “The problem seems to be that you don’t know how to court a woman.”

“You’ve got to be kidding, old man. I’ve done things with women you’ve never even heard of. One time—”

“Not sex, boy! The only sex that matters is if you make the woman you love happy. You can do a threesome with half a dozen gorgeous dames, but if the one you love ain’t smiling at you over breakfast, you’re a failure in the sex department.”

Travis stood still as he thought about that, and it made sense. He bent back to the box but then straightened up again. “Just so you know, a threesome is with three people, not half a dozen.” He went back into the carton.

“Make her
need
you,” Joe said after a while. “Not want you, but deep down need you. Whether it’s to give her a foot rub at the end of the day, or to fix the kitchen sink, find an empty place in her life and fill it.”

“Does my mother need you?” Travis asked in curiosity.

“She can hardly thread those sewing machines of hers without me.”

Travis smiled at that. Since they’d first visited Edilean his mother had sewn, and she’d never had trouble threading anything.

Joe seemed to understand his smile. “Okay, so Lucy pretends she can’t thread the serger or change the needles. But she gave me pointers on filling out the form for the mortgage application. She even told me what to wear and what to say when I went to the bank. She helped me order everything in here, and she and Jecca picked out all the colors of paint and tile. Lucy made the curtains.”

“Sounds like you need her more than she needs you.”

“That’s just it!” Joe said. “She needs me and I need her. We’re twisted.”

“Intertwined,” Travis said.

Joe narrowed his eyes. “You may have been to school more than me, but I got the woman I’m in love with.”

“You have a point. What am I supposed to do with these pieces of metal?”

“I’m going to show you how to use a screwdriver.”

“My life is at last complete,” Travis muttered and picked up a socket wrench.

Eight