A Month at the Shore (20 page)

Even Miss Widdich had somehow managed to make herself not only pleasant, but useful. She planted herself, cane and all, next to the table that featured her herbs and took it upon herself to advise browsers on the fine art of herbal medicine and cookery. Never mind that all most of them wanted was a simple pot of basil or chives; Miss Widdich was a fount of facts, and she wasn't afraid to spout them. After hearing her, Laura was sorry that she hadn't invited her to conduct a seminar on herbs.

Maybe next year.

Through it all, Laura kept a weather eye out for Kendall Barclay III. She spotted his assistant among the customers, and a teller from the bank was there too. But the president of Chepaquit Savings was a no-show so far. It was disappointing at first, crushing by lunch. She wanted Ken to witness their amazing turnaround! He would be pleased that his bank's money had been so wisely invested.

Besides that, she wanted him to be there because
... she wanted him to be there. Period. He had said he would come, and he was a man of his word; she believed in him instinctively now. So she searched for him among her customers, and watched for his car, and tried to be as enthusiastic about the glorious day as her sister was, although she wasn't quite able to match her level.

Laura's late lunch was a half-melted PowerBar that she had been carrying in her pocket, and a handful of her sister's oatmeal cookies, which sounded healthier than they were. The dried-flowers workshop was coming up. If Ken arrived during it, Laura would miss him.

She put her disappointment aside as she set up the materials for her event, because she knew that a woman did not have the right to be crushed simply because the holder of her loan didn't show up.

She was joined by her sister, who came rushing into the greenhouse bearing a tray of brownies. Corinne was out of breath and on the run.

"Believe it or not," she said as she laid out napkins and paper cups next to the coffee urn on a rickety card table, "someone has just applied for a job here. Lucy something. Nice girl. She's worked at nurseries before. Sounds pretty knowledgeable. Not like Melissa. I think Lucy has appeared as a blessing. I told her to get to work and we'd worry about the paperwork later."

"Oh,
Rin,"
Laura argued. "Was that really a good idea? What about liability, what about—?"

Corinne waved away her sister's fears. "It's not as if she's going to fall overboard and drown or something. For heaven's sake—this is a nursery. What could possibly happen?"

"She could pull her back; she could fall under the tractor—which is the number one reason of death in this type of workplace, incidentally," Laura pointed out.

"She didn't look like the type to sue." Corinne picked up a brownie and offered it to her sister. "Here. Chocolate. It'll soothe your nerves. You have pre-presentation jitters, that's all. Stop being so negative; you just have to trust."

The last thing that Laura could easily do.

But she took the brownie and hugged her sister. "You're so damn much better than I'll ever be," she said, her voice suddenly husky and emotional.

Startled into laughter, Corinne said, "What was
that
all about?"

"You. You're so full of hope. But you're a
Shore.
Where do you get it from?"

"Come to church with me next time and see," Corinne quipped. "What, would it kill you to break away from here for an hour?"

"It's not church. You were always like that. You were the shyest and yet somehow managed to be the most optimistic."

"Maybe the two things go hand in hand," Corinne said lightly. "It's easy to be hopeful when you don't know what's out there—"

Her face broke into a sudden happy grin. Laura turned and saw Gabe Wellerton entering the greenhouse with a man who she thought looked vaguely familiar.

Gabe met Corinne's grin with one of his own and matched her ebullience. "Ladies, I want you to meet someone who can throw a hell of a lot of business your way: Joe Penchance. He's certainly thrown it my way; as you know, I'm doing all the fences for his Bayview Estates development."

"Ah, that must be where I've seen you," said Laura to their visitor as they all shook hands.

Her response to him was predictably schizophrenic. He was a developer, after all, which automatically made him one of the enemy in her book. But on the other hand, someone like him could make the difference as to whether Shore Gardens would be able to stay afloat or not.

Better to be nice, for now. "I hope you've had a chance to look around the nursery, Mr. Penchance. We have quite a bit of stock, but it's somewhat spread out."

"I've been roaming all over the place," he said with a congenial smile. "It's a big place. Prime acreage."

He was probably pacing it off and figuring out how many houses he could squeeze in.

"If we don't have what you need," Laura said, smiling, "Corinne certainly can order it for you."

Penchance nodded and said, "Trees. Small, decorative trees."

"Not large shade trees?"

He sighed and said, "Generally the homebuyers go for the pretty ones, not the big ones. Maybe they don't have the patience to wait for a tree to mature. It's too bad. I'm with you on planting shade trees if there's room: people ought to plant for the generations ahead of them."

"But the customer is always right," Laura said laconically. "Isn't that what we keep saying, Corinne?"

Poor Corinne. She was like a fieldmouse searching for grains of corn to keep from starving while a hawk sat on a branch overhead, watching and waiting. She nodded nervously but didn't say a word to their hovering visitor.

What an incredible change in her in the space of sixty seconds.

Laura and Penchance exchanged pleasantries about the terrific turnout, and then the developer smiled at them both and said, "Well, I'd better find my little girl and my wife before the clown runs out of balloons—and you run out of geraniums."

"Well! That doesn't sound so terrible," Laura quipped.

They left, and she said in a musing aside to her sister, "Not so terrible at all."

****

All of the sign-ups, including Miss Widdich, were present by ten minutes before the appointed hour, so Laura used the extra time for the students to introduce themselves.

Totally unnecessary. Everyone seemed to know everyone, and despite the fact that they were all new faces to Laura, most of them knew her. Or at least, of her. She felt surprisingly notorious. After all, she was the niece of a murderer. In a small village like Chepaquit, that counted for something.

Well, let them satisfy their curiosity about her. She was filled with wry resignation. They'd plunked down good money for the right to know whether or not she ran true to seed like her murderous forebears, and she was going to give them a full hour to decide for themselves.

All things considered, Laura was glad she'd taken the time to duck into the house and change from work khakis to a challis jumper that she'd found on one of her dashes into T.J. Maxx. She felt pretty in lavender. And she felt confident that she knew more about flowers and how to dry them than anyone else in her audience. She felt everything
... but happy.

Where was he? He said he'd be there.

She put the thought of Ken aside as gently as she would a dried pansy, and then she turned her attention to the class.

A minor plumbing crisis at the bank made him late, so Ken had to decide whether or not to crash Laura's seminar on dried flowers.

Twenty women.

Shriveled plants.

Nope.

He compromised by parking himself, with a cup of coffee, on a broken-down bench just outside the greenhouse where Laura was giving her talk. Sipping the surprisingly good brew, he sat back and listened to the sound of her voice rather than to her actual words. By now he was so besotted that she could have been explaining the easiest way to rob a bank. He wouldn't have been any the wiser.

She was irresistible. Each time he saw her, she struck him as more beautiful. He remembered reading that once a person had been successfully hypnotized, the person hypnotized more and more easily. That was him, all right. Completely under her spell. He wanted her more than any woman he'd ever known.

Too soon, too soon, knucklehead. You've hardly spent any time with her.

However: at least it was spent in bed.

Yeah, but it was spent straightening out a pathetic misunderstanding.

Whatever. At least it was spent in bed.

She let herself be carried away by you. Li
terally. That doesn
't mean she'd let you do it again.

Like hell.

Why? Why her?

Now that was the million-dollar question. The easy answer was that Laura Shore was an attractive, sexy woman—but he'd been with plenty of attractive and sexy women before. What was it about this one that had him sharing a broken-down bench with a dozen potted ferns just to be able to hear the sound of her
voice
?

Well, they shared a history; there was that. A traumatic history. And from a formative, vulnerable time in their lives. Maybe that was it. He had thought about her a lot over the years, wondering how she was doing, how her life was working out. He knew from Corinne that Laura had gone west to find her fortune and that she'd done well
... but still he wondered.

And now here she was, right back in Chepaquit. And single. And apparently attracted to him. He broke into a private, irrepressible grin. Laura Shore had had such a profound effect on him that he was happy just to be hearing her telling her audience how to do something or other with paper towels.

So it was all the more exasperating when he heard Gabe's big hound just a few feet away, wrecking the show: Baskerville had a bark straight out of hell, and the name to back it up.

Ken let out an irritated sigh. He wasn't able to hear Laura over the dog's din, and presumably neither could anyone in her class. He went around to the other side of the greenhouse to quiet the animal, who was alternately barking and growling as he pawed and dug at the edge of what was left of the compost pile that Snack was in the process of relocating. The dog was downright gleeful with the thrill of some discovery.

"Hey! Bass! C'mere, boy
... c'mon," Ken said, modulating his voice as he approached the dog. "What d'ya got there, boy, huh? C'mere. Give it here."

Yeah, right; as if. Baskerville had found himself a bone. It was still stuck in the ground, but it wouldn't be there for long. The dog now had it solidly in his jaw as he worried it back and forth, all the while keeping one eye on Ken as he approached, and warning him off with an occasional growl.

At least he wasn't barking anymore. Ken crouched down at a respectful distance for a better look. Damned big bone, he thought. From what? A horse? A cow? It wouldn't be surprising; the land had been farmed long before it became a nursery. He watched,
interested
, as the dog worked at freeing his half-buried treasure, pawing the ground around it. The compost was rich and crumbly and easily worked. In short order, Baskerville had what he was after.

Gripping the bone—which looked like a fragment, at that—the big shaggy dog went loping off, no doubt to bury it someplace else.

Curious now, Ken walked over to the edge of the small mound of earth to check it out. He had a pal in Hyannis, of all places, who was a cowboy wannabe and had outfitted his den with Western paraphernalia. Pete would get a kick out of having a cattle skull perched on his humongous new
TV.

Ken toed around in Baskerville's spot and soon came up with the rest of the bones, brown and wormy with age. His mood began morphing from curious to chilled, even before he found the shreds of cloth. And when he found the skull, that's when he knew: it wasn't a cow or a horse or a sheep from a New England farm that had been buried here.

It was somebody's deadly secret.

****

Ken had shown up at last! And none too soon.

Glancing out from the greenhouse,
Laura was relieved to see him calm Gabe's barking dog.

Friendly or not, the animal had been making a shambles of her class. But it was quiet now. Life could proceed.

"Before we begin to arrange the dried flowers that I've provided for the workshop," she said, "does anyone have any questions?"

A hand shot up. Rosie Nedworth, who used to run
Chep
aquit Dry Cleaners and who used to be (and probably still was) the town's biggest gossip, said, "What if we're not ready to use the flowers for a while after we press them in the paper towels? I belong to a Christmas crafts club
. 
We
don't start our projects until after everyone's kids and grandkids are back in school."

"No problem," Laura answered. "After they've dried, a good way to store pressed flowers until you're ready to use them is to leave them between the paper towels and then slide the whole shebang—very carefully!—into a plastic sheet protector. You can get them at any office supply store."