Gotcha! (4 page)

Julie pressed the button on the dishwasher to clean up her cooking utensils just as Cooper slammed his huge body against the kitchen door. A nanosecond later, Gracie hit the doorbell with a look that clearly said this is a woman’s job. Cooper bounded into the house, sniffed at the oven, then planted his paws on Julie’s shoulders, his plea for TLC, which she gave willingly. Gracie was next, nudging her leg, so Julie sat down on the kitchen floor and rolled around, Cooper’s tennis ball, which he slept with, in her hand.

“Did he kick you out, or did you come home willingly?” Julie gasped when Cooper pinned her to the floor as he tried to get the ball. Gracie barked twice. Twice meant yes, they came home willingly because Cooper was anxious. At least, that’s what she thought it meant.

“Okay, enough,” Julie said, struggling to her feet. “We have to set the table since we’re having a guest. C’mon, now, Coop, let me up.” Gracie nipped Coop’s ear, and he yelped, but then he moved. “Thank you, Gracie.”

Within minutes, Julie had the kitchen table set with place mats and dishes she used when she wanted to impress. She loved the vivid blue violets on the plates, the mats, and the napkins. When she ate alone, she usually ate off hard plastic plates and used paper napkins so she wouldn’t have to run the dishwasher a second time. She was into conserving everything on the planet, and that included water. She had a fat blue candle she sometimes used, but decided that might be overkill for such a casual dinner with someone she didn’t even know and who might just be an ax murderer.

As she folded the napkins, she stopped to wonder what kind of palate Oliver Goldfeld had. Did he eat high-end food like lobster and filet mignon? Did he eat out all the time since he didn’t cook? Was he married? She should have asked, but then, that was none of her business. A rental was a rental. Maybe his wife cooked, or maybe they had a housekeeper. She shrugged. If he didn’t like her dinner, then he would simply not eat it, and she and the dogs would be the judge of whether her food would pass muster so she could include the recipe in her cookbook. Personally, she loved stuffed peppers, especially with the fire-roasted tomato sauce.

With an hour to kill before dinner, Julie went to the little built-in nook in the kitchen, where she kept her laptop. She uploaded the pictures she’d taken, then opened a new file and typed in both recipes. Such a lot of meticulous, painstaking work, she chided herself.
I really have to sit down and write that book one of these days.

Done!

Just time enough to wash her face and comb her hair, which she promptly did.

“Okay, Gracie, go get our guest. You only have to ring the doorbell once,” Julie said, opening the back door to let the big dog out. Cooper waited to see if he was to follow. When he didn’t get his command, he trotted over to the sink and lay down on the rubber mat, his beloved red tennis ball between his paws.

While the beaters went to work on the mashed potatoes, Julie realized that she was nervous. Just as nervous as she was when she had to look at the paper she’d been carrying around in her pocket for over a month now. Her heart thumped in her chest. When it quieted down, she muttered to herself, “What will be will be.”

D
inner over, Julie suggested they head for the veranda with their second cup of coffee. Mace agreed, and they settled themselves in two of the five ancient—repainted a hundred times—rockers. The paddle fans overhead gave off a soft whisper of a breeze, while the mister sprayed the luscious ferns that hung from the overhang. Julie smiled when she heard Mace sigh.

“This is so . . . I don’t know what the word is I want to use. Your dinner was beyond my expectations. I can’t remember when I had a meal like that. Probably when I was a kid, and my mother cooked for me. I can’t believe you cook for your dogs. Lola loved the beef meatballs you mixed with her dog food. I didn’t know you couldn’t give dogs turkey or tomato sauce. I never met anyone like you, Julie Wyatt,” Mace said as he held his face up to the mist swirling over the ferns. “I just love all this,” he added, waving his arms about.

“I guess I’ll take that as a compliment, Oliver Goldfeld. Tell me about yourself. I probably should know something about my tenant. I’m not talking secrets here, just normal stuff.”

Mace hated lying to his landlady, the same lady who had shared dinner with him, the dinner that she had cooked. Well, she did say not to share secrets.

“I’m a pretty boring person, Julie. I never married.”
That was true, Oliver had never married.
“Corporate law is dull and time-consuming. I live in New York. There are times when I love it and times when I hate the frenzy of it. I liked this little town the minute I arrived. My original intent was to drive to Huntsville, but when I walked around your town square, and people—people I didn’t know—said hello to me and smiled at me, I thought this might be a good place to hang my hat for a little while.”

Julie digested the information. She didn’t know why, but she thought Oliver was parsing his words very carefully. She decided it was the lawyer in him just being careful.

“The South, Rosemont in particular, is a wonderful place. I had a hard time adjusting to the slower pace down here, slower even than in Vermont, which is not particularly frenzied itself, but I acclimated fairly quickly. I wouldn’t go back to the North for all the tea in China. And our winters are mild. The older I get, the more I appreciate the milder temperatures. How do you like living in New York?”

“I’ve never lived anywhere else. Never found a place that appealed to me. Until now.” He laughed. “I might decide to retire here one of these days.”

Julie chuckled. “That’s pretty funny. Everyone who visits me says the same thing. Then they go back home to wherever it is they live and promptly forget about this place.”

“This is really a big—how should I refer to it?—
spread
, for one person living alone. Don’t you get lonely?” His stomach churning about the lies he’d told, with more to follow, he hoped Julie wouldn’t ask him too many questions. He’d never been a liar, and it wasn’t coming to him naturally, as it did to some people who just lied for the sake of lying.

Julie laughed again. “No, not really. I have the dogs. My kids live within walking distance. I keep busy. Friends, that kind of thing. You live alone, or do you have a significant other?”

Hah. There it was, tossed right back into his lap. “No significant other. To be honest, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything I have to do. I’m rarely home, and when I am, all I do is sleep.” That was true, too. Oliver didn’t have anyone special in his life at the moment. A lie is a lie, he warned himself.

“And yet, here you are,” Julie said lightly, almost playfully.

One more lie coming right up. “Yes, here I am. I needed some downtime to prepare for an upcoming trial. Away from interruptions and distractions. It’s a very important trial.” It wasn’t
exactly
a lie; it was Oliver’s life he was talking about. Somehow, though, he didn’t think Julie Wyatt would look at it like that. To her, a lie would be a lie no matter what. Maybe he needed to quit while he was ahead and go back to the cottage he’d just rented. But he didn’t want to leave. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this much at peace, so contented. The answer was probably never.

“Do you think you’ll win?”

“Oh, absolutely. There is no doubt in my mind.” Oliver always won when he went to court. Even though Oliver’s specialty was corporate law, he also happened to be a superlative litigator. Before Julie could ask another question, Mace dived in with a question of his own. “What is it like to host a TV show? And what about the cookbook you say you will probably never write?”

“I used to do a little locally produced program on cooking for a PBS station in Vermont. It was pretty much of a hobby. I guess some people on the Food Network happened to see my show and asked if I would like to host one of their programs. I said I would, and here I am.

“When I was a teenager, I used to read romances and thought that maybe I would try my hand at that when I grew up. Never happened. Never actually wrote anything.

“But as I continue to host cooking shows on the Food Network, I keep thinking about different ways to present recipes in a cookbook. I keep meaning to start the book, but, somehow, it never happens.

“My life took a change when I started at the Food Network, and, no, it had nothing to do with the death of my husband. He passed away while we were living up in Vermont, a few years after I started hosting.”

Julie got up off her chair to turn the misters off. When she sat back down, Mace should have been intuitive enough not to ask any more questions, but he didn’t listen to the inner voice whispering in his ear that enough was enough.

“That’s so interesting. You mentioned that your children live close by. Tell me about them. Do you have any grandchildren to dangle on your knee?”

Mace knew in an instant that he’d asked the wrong question. Even in the lavender twilight, he could see the pain in Julie Wyatt’s eyes.

He tried to cover up his question with a statement. “Well, would you look at the time! I hope you won’t think me rude, but I’m really tired, and I think Lola is, too. I know a guest should never eat and run. But all of a sudden, I just can’t keep my eyes open. Hopefully, we can talk about kids and everything under the sun tomorrow or some other day when you have free time.”

Mace was up and off his chair like he’d been shot in the tail with a load of buckshot. He scooped Lola up and waved wildly as he rushed down the steps to the footpath that would take him to the alpine cottage.

Julie barely noticed her guest’s departure. She sat a while longer as the solar lights in the yard came on one by one. For some reason, she always thought of the solar lights as fairy lights, something to make her smile.

Cooper, always more sensitive to her emotions than Gracie, nuzzled her leg and whimpered. She stroked his silky head just as Gracie made her presence known. She hugged both dogs, and the tears she’d held in check were rolling down her cheeks.

“I don’t think I handled that very well, guys. Even after all this time . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Come on, let’s go in and empty the dishwasher. Then I’ll give you some of that dog ice cream you hate so much.” As both dogs tried to slink off on their bellies, Julie said, “Yeah, well, I’m not wasting my money, so you have to eat it until it’s all gone.” Gracie barked shrilly as Cooper nipped at her tail.

Her thoughts everywhere but on the brainless task of emptying the dishwasher, Julie finished, then ladled out the dog ice cream, which even smelled terrible. The dogs sniffed it, circled around it, then gulped at it. Both retrievers looked up at her as if to say,
Okay, we ate it. Now can we have a chew bone?
Julie obliged.

Julie looked at the clock on the stove. Too early to go to bed. She’d caught up on her notes and recipes. She didn’t have a good book to read—not that she would have been able to concentrate—so that left television and reruns of something she’d probably seen at least a dozen times already.

Settled on the sofa, Cooper on one side, Gracie on the other side, Julie settled down to watch a rerun of
The Closer.
She loved the feisty chief of police. Within seconds, she was sound asleep.

Not so the two retrievers. They lay with their heads on their paws, their eyes and ears alert to any strange sounds that might wake their mistress. They knew the doors hadn’t been locked or the alarm turned on.

Cooper looked at Gracie and tilted his head. Gracie hopped off the couch and went from door to door, turning the dead bolts just the way Julie had taught her, back in the days when Julie hadn’t been able to function and barely knew what her name was. Satisfied with her task, she moved on to the alarm. All she had to do was press the blue button, and the house would be locked up tighter than a drum. She waited, her ear tuned to the three pings that told her she could go back to the sofa. Her tail swished with excitement as she stood in front of Cooper to see if he approved. He did, and showed it by tapping her lightly on the snout with one of his big paws.

Precisely at ten fifty-five, Cooper’s internal clock kicked in. He leaned over and started licking Julie’s face. Gracie let loose with an earsplitting bark, which meant, get up, it’s time to go to bed. Julie obliged. She turned off the TV and looked over at Gracie. “Did you lock up, Gracie?” Gracie barked twice. “Good girl! Okay, quick in and out, then it’s sack time. No visiting with our new tenants, just go pee and get right back in here.” Both dogs ran to the sunroom and the oversize doggie door. They were in and out in five minutes.

In her bedroom, Julie’s small television was on. More often than not, she left it on all night because she was a poor sleeper. She’d sleep an hour or so, wake up, watch television for a while, then doze off but never into a sound sleep. Once, she’d slept through the night and always woke refreshed. Those days were gone, never to return. As she brushed her teeth, she could hear the news anchor babbling over the sound of running water. Bank executives were still blaming everyone but themselves for the massive losses they had suffered when the housing market turned against them. Some sports giant not worth the money he was being paid was threatening to leave his current team. Last month’s big lottery winner still hadn’t claimed the prize. Two more movie stars were going into rehab. Again.

The euro kept falling, and the talking heads were wondering if the European Union was going to survive and what effect that might have on the barely recovering American economy. “Like the world really needs this before they go to bed,” Julie mumbled as she emptied out her pockets and stripped down.

She swallowed hard when she stared down at the piece of paper she’d been carrying around in her pocket for so long. She shook her head to clear her thoughts as she pulled on a sleep shirt with a picture of Mustang Sally on the front. The picture was of herself and had been a long-ago gift from one of her sons, because “Mustang Sally” was her favorite song. She slept in the shirt every night and washed it every morning. It was threadbare. She wondered again, as she often did, if changing her sleep attire would allow her to sleep better. She never came up with an answer.

Julie was about to click off the TV with the remote and climb into bed when she did a double take at what she was seeing—and hearing—right in front of her eyes. In the time it took her heart to beat twice and to gasp in surprise, Cooper and Gracie were on her bed as they tried to snuggle into her lap, something they never did unless there was a thunderstorm. Her mouth wide open in shock, she stared at the picture on television of her new tenant. Only his name wasn’t Oliver Goldfeld; it was Mace Carlisle.
Lawyer
Oliver Goldfeld was fielding questions from a persistent reporter right in front of a building in lower Manhattan that said
CARLISLE PHARMACEUTICALS
in huge brass letters next to the plate-glass doors.

When the anchor moved on to the weather, Julie finally closed her mouth and thought about what she’d just heard. Her brand-new tenant had lied to her. Her brand-new tenant and his drug company were being accused—by his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Eileen, and her son, Eli—of paying off the FDA for approval on a new drug for high cholesterol in children. Wall Street was in a tizzy, and shareholders were up in arms that the stock shares they owned were going to plummet. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Mace Carlisle had hightailed it out of town, leaving his lawyer, Oliver Goldfeld, to clean up the mess—including serving divorce papers and evicting the wife, Eileen, from their pricey apartment in the Dakota and firing the son, Eli, from the company and tossing him out of his digs in the Trump Towers.

That was the end of Julie Wyatt’s sleep for the night. She recalled words her deceased husband used to say: Nothing is as it seems, and there are two sides to everything. Do not judge, do not assume, and do not presume. Words to take to heart.