Stranger in the Moonlight (22 page)

“Please do,” Kim said. “Eighteen years and nothing. I was forgotten by you.”

“That’s not really true. I always knew where—” Travis said, then shut his mouth.

Kim looked at Russell in question.

“Mom said that you were never out of his radar. She said he used to—”

“I saw your shows,” Travis said quickly before Russell could say any more.

Kim’s eyes widened. “You! It was
you
. Jecca saw you there. She used to call you the TDH Stranger. She even drew your portrait, but I had no idea who you were.”

“TDH?” Travis asked.

“Tall, dark, and handsome,” Russell said. “This beer is good. I’ve never had it before.” He looked at Travis. “Want one?”

“Only if it doesn’t have hemlock in it,” Travis muttered as Russell, smiling, got a beer out, opened it, and handed it to him.

Travis drank half of it in one gulp, then dropped down onto a stool. He looked back at Kim as though to say he was ready to receive more of her verbal lashes. “I thought I was watching over you,” he said.

“Ah, right, how noble. ‘Watching over me.’ ‘Looking out for me.’ Is that right?”

“I thought so,” Travis said and drank more beer.

Russell started making a sandwich for Travis. Neither of them had eaten since breakfast.

“So now,” Kim said, “you returned to Edilean not for me—oh no, not for
me
—but because your mother called you.”

“Actually,” Russell said as he cut the bread, “she called my mother and told her.”

“Even better,” Kim said. “Lucy Merritt or Cooper or Maxwell called . . . What
is
her name?” she asked Russell.

“Cooper and Merritt are made up. Her name is Lucy Jane Travis Maxwell of the Boston Travises. She got the name and education but none of the family’s old money. My mother is Barbara Pendergast of no money and no name. Just hard work.”

“Thank you,” Kim said. She looked back at Travis as he bit into the sandwich Russell had made for him. He looked like a man walking up the gallows steps. “Whatever the name, the point is that you didn’t come back for me, but for your mother.”

Travis got up to get two more beers.

“Because of Jecca’s wedding you happened to see me and . . . one thing led to another.”

Russell looked at Travis in question.

“She means inviting me to stay in her guesthouse,” Travis said.

Russell nodded and looked back at Kim as though to say the floor was hers.

“You moved into my guesthouse and talked to me so much about friendship that I was beginning to think you were gay. And you—”

Russell gave a snort of laughter.

“I never meant—” Travis began.

“How’s Leslie?” Kim asked, letting every millimeter of her anger show.

Travis looked down at his sandwich.

She picked up the ring and looked at Russell. “When I said I had a boyfriend, he almost had a grand mal seizure of old-fashioned jealousy.”

“I did not,” Travis said as he started to defend himself. But every word Kim was saying was true. “I was shocked, that’s all,” he mumbled.

“Shocked that I had a boyfriend?” Kim said. “You are . . .” Her eyes widened in disbelief. “You’ve watched me—stalked me—enough that you knew when I had a boyfriend or not.” It was a statement, not a question.

Travis wouldn’t have answered that if someone had set his feet on fire. That his mother had listened to Edilean gossip and told him about Kim on nearly every call was beside the point. It suddenly went through his mind to wonder if it was a coincidence that she called just when Kim was getting serious about some guy. And she called when there was going to be a wedding next door to her where Kim was a bridesmaid. His mother had called Penny—who she’d always disliked—and it was his secretary who got him to go to Edilean ASAP. Had it been up to Travis, he might have postponed going to Edilean, but Penny set everything up. Right now it seemed as though the two women had worked together to get Travis to Edilean at a time when he was sure to see Kim again. But that couldn’t be true. Surely, all of it was coincidence.

Kim’s hands were in fists and she had to turn away for a moment to catch her breath. “You thought . . .” she said softly. “You thought that since you’re a big city lawyer and you were born into great wealth, that you know more about life than I do.”

“Kim, I never thought that,” Travis said as he put down his sandwich. “It wasn’t like that at all.”

“You assumed that I was a naive, simple, small town girl who was so desperate to get married that I couldn’t see the truth about some guy I was dating regularly.”

“Kim, you’re not being fair,” Travis said as he came off the stool. “Borman was a real bastard. He conned Carla into giving him that ring, saying he was going to give it to you when he asked you to marry him. But then he pawned it. I—we—think that he was going to say he knew nothing about the ring and let Carla take the blame.”

Kim didn’t allow the shock of that information to show on her face. “How did
you
get it?”

Travis sat back down and looked at his plate.

“He bought Borman Catering,” Russell said.

Travis looked at him with murder in his eyes.

“You did what?” Kim asked in disbelief.

“He paid a hundred and seventy-five grand for the company,” Russell said. He’d finished his sandwich and was working on the second beer. “He was going to pay more, but I got Borman down to that. It’s still too much.”

“Much too much,” Kim said. “Those vans of his are worn-out and Dave’s lost commissions because he doesn’t deliver what he promises.”

“I thought it was too much too,” Russell said, “but we were up against a deadline.”

Travis looked at Russell in disgust for ratting on him. “Kim, I think we’re losing sight of the main issue here. Borman was going to ask you to marry him and I was afraid you’d say yes.”

“And when he proposed, he’d give me my ring back!” Kim said loudly. She threw up her hands. “Men! I’ve had all of you I can take this week. Today I had to threaten Carla with firing her because of what she’d done.”

“You should fire her,” Travis said seriously. “What she did was a prosecutable offense.”

“She was conned by a
man
! It’s a hazard of being female. And for your information, in Edilean we don’t discard someone for making a single mistake.”

“As I did,” Travis said softly as he looked at her with eyes begging for forgiveness.

“
You
have made a thousand mistakes. And stop looking at me like that! You already showed me that face, remember? You used it to get the pretty young wife of the old man to teach you how to cook—along with other things.”

Russell laughed. “She’s got
you
figured out.”

“Kim, I never meant—”

“I know!” she said loudly. “I’m sure that from your view you came swooping in on your white horse and rescued me. But I didn’t
need
rescuing. I didn’t need someone to make me look like a fool, to make me feel that I’m an idiot who can’t run my own life. What I need is—” She couldn’t take any more. “Out! Both of you get out of my house and out of my life. I never want to see either of you again.”

Both of the men got up and started for the door. When Travis passed her she said, “Did you ever think that it’s not the Maxwell name that brings out the bad in people? That it’s
you
?”

Travis had no answer for her.

Kim slammed the door behind them, locked it, then leaned back against it. “For your information, John Travis Maxwell,
I
want love too.”

Two minutes later she was calling the person she wanted to talk to about all this. He answered on the first ring and said he’d meet her right away. Twenty minutes later she was pulling into Joe Layton’s parking lot.

Twelve

Joe Layton’s solution
to every problem was the same: food and work. After he’d spent thirty minutes listening to Kim’s nearly incoherent words that she uttered in between copious tears, and feeding her, he put her to work. As he had her help him put the supplies Travis had unpacked on the shelves that he’d installed, Joe couldn’t help musing on the fact that their turbulent love life was giving him a lot of free labor.

“I don’t get it,” she said as she picked up boxes of electric drills and put them on the shelves. “Why would he make so much effort to get a man away from me if all he plans to do is leave me and go back to . . . to wherever he lives?”

“New York,” Joe said. “Lives on the top floor of some big building.”

“He told you that?”

“No, but I found out.”

“That means you’ve known Travis’s last name and you looked him up on the Internet,” Kim said with a sigh. “Reede said I’d find out everything there, but he couldn’t wait to send me info. But who wants to find out about someone on the Web? But then, why does everything Travis tells me have to be a lie? Or an evasion? What’s happened in his life that makes him think even the most ordinary things have to be kept secret?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said. They were questions that were bothering him too. He’d given Lucy every opportunity to tell him about her son, but she hadn’t. Three times she’d almost said “my son” but each time she’d caught herself. Joe was trying hard not to get angry about it, but it wasn’t easy. “Are you in love with young Travis?” he blurted out.

Kim paused for a moment in putting a box on the shelf. “How can I be? I thought I knew the boy Travis, but the adult . . . I don’t know who he is. He seems to think he has a right to oversee my life. He takes away from me but gives nothing in return.” She knew that wasn’t true, but her anger wasn’t allowing her to reason.

The red light on Joe’s cell phone came on again. He had it on silent so Kim couldn’t hear it, but Joe knew that Travis had called him eight times since she’d arrived. He also knew he was going to have to deal with the young man or he’d show up at the door. And with the mood Kim was in now, she might throw an anvil at him.

“Didn’t I hear that you were supposed to do something special this weekend?” Joe asked.

Kim groaned. As angry as she was, it didn’t dampen her artist’s eye as she arranged the small machines on the shelves. She put them up with all the finesse that she used to display her jewelry. “Jocelyn—she’s married to my cousin—wants me to go to some little town in Maryland to see if I can find out about some great-great-grandaunt of mine. Joce is doing genealogy charts, and this woman in Maryland had a kid but there’s no father listed. This is back in 1890-something. I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this. But anyway, Dave wanted to go with me and we were going to make it a minivacation. He was going to . . .” She waved her hand. If she continued talking, she’d start crying again. “I think I’d better cancel my reservation.”

She couldn’t help thinking about what might have been. What
would
she have done if Dave had asked her to marry him? She’d told Travis she’d known all about the man, but she hadn’t. Hearing that he’d pawned the ring he’d slick-talked Carla into “giving” him had made Kim feel sick. She’d not seen anything in Dave that made her think he was capable of such thievery. He’d always been so very nice—boring, but pleasant and likeable. His talks about her going national with her jewelry had always been presented in the most respectful way, saying that it was her decision, and he was only tossing out ideas. And she really had thought the name he’d suggested was just a crude joke.

She’d only heard about Dave’s company’s failure the day before Jecca’s wedding, the day before Travis reappeared in her life. She’d seen that two of his vans were on their last legs, but he’d laughed and said he had too much work to do to order new ones. She’d had no reason to disbelieve him.

But the day before the wedding, when everything was chaos and there were so many people around, Kim had overheard a woman saying she was glad Jecca hadn’t used that “dreadful” Borman Catering. Kim had tried to get him for the wedding, but he’d been booked solid. Kim had asked the woman why she didn’t like Borman Catering and she’d been told the story of the switched ingredients. And she’d heard that people were canceling their future orders with him. At the time, Kim had been so busy helping Jecca that she hadn’t thought about what that meant. When Kim looked back on it, she realized that she hadn’t wanted to see that Dave’s business was going under. And she didn’t want to think about that in connection to how often he asked for the combination to her safe.

Was Dave yet another man in her life who couldn’t see past her success?

Kim arranged a hand drill in its case as artistically as she could manage, then started putting up the boxes of bits.

When Joe excused himself to make a call, Kim continued to work—and to think.

Okay, so maybe it was true that she didn’t know as much about Dave as she’d told Travis she did, but did that give him the right to . . . to . . . take over?

She thought of Travis buying Borman Catering. Why? But she knew the answer. He paid all that money just to send Dave away. On the drive to Joe’s she’d called a client who lived in Dave’s building and was told that he’d left with six suitcases and had told the landlord he wasn’t coming back.