Kiss the Moon (9 page)

Wyatt Sinclair was everything she had imagined a Sinclair would be. Tall, dark, good-looking in an un-pretty sort of way. She smiled,
knowing
they were related. The Chestnuts were her family, but the Sinclairs—they were different. They were blood.

Absurdly, she’d found herself wanting to touch him when he’d come down to ask directions to Penelope’s house. It was as if touching him would make the connection between them more real. A Sinclair here in Cold Spring, in her house.

Then there was Jack Dunning, Brandon Sinclair’s private investigator.

“Lord,” Harriet breathed, feeling like a fainthearted heroine of Victorian stereotype instead of the capable, independent businesswoman she was. But what fun to have two such men under her roof. Jack Dunning wasn’t at all handsome, but he radiated strength and sexuality and a raw intelligence one would be loath to underestimate.

And the black cowboy boots, the cowboy hat, the put-on Texas accent. In New Hampshire in the dead of March. Harriet suppressed a giggle. She hadn’t expected
that.

Andy McNally eased behind the oak bar and helped himself to a bottle of Long Trail beer, his nightly custom. He smiled at her. “Evening, Harriet. You’re looking like you swallowed the canary.”

She waved a hand. “Oh, it’s nothing. How are you this evening?”

“Not too bad.” He opened the bottle and poured the beer into a tall glass, letting it foam to a perfect head. “We pulled in extra speeding tickets thanks to your cousin.”

“She didn’t speed—”

“No, she wasn’t
caught
speeding.” Andy didn’t have much use for Penelope, which she and Harriet and everyone else in Cold Spring knew. “It was all those reporters she lured into town with that cockamamie story of hers.”

“It was an honest mistake, Andy.”

He frowned, and she could see the fatigue in his light-colored eyes, the strain of a long day. He was a big, burly, gray-haired man, born and raised in Cold Spring. He had lost his wife in a car accident five years ago. He’d almost died himself. A jagged, fearsome scar ran along his hair-line from the top of his head to his neck. Now he was raising two teenage daughters on his own and seeing to a small town as its police chief. He liked the image of Cold Spring as a quiet, safe lakeside village.

He drank some of his beer, sighing into the glass. “Penelope makes too many honest mistakes, Harriet. One day they’re going to catch up with her. I don’t care how optimistic and brazen she is.”

He wasn’t the only one in town who shared that opinion. But Harriet didn’t want to let go of her bubbly mood. “You’re tired. Drink your beer and relax.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You’re not going to tell me why you’re about ready to chortle?”

She could feel her cheeks warming. For once, she wasn’t turning red simply from embarrassment or standing over a hot stove. But she said coyly, “It’s been an interesting day, that’s why.”

“You’ve been making money off those reporters.” Andy came around with his beer and sat on the stool next to her, as he did most nights. He would walk from his house in the village, taking a half hour from his roles as chief of police and widower father of two. “Nothing you like better than a positive cash flow, except you won’t admit it. You sit there pretending to be the lady of the manor when you’ve got that calculator mind of yours working up figures.”

“You think you know me so well.”

“Nah, Harriet.” He grinned at her, looking less tired. “I don’t know you at all.”

“Oh, Andy.”

He swallowed more beer, his steady presence helping to calm her happy jitteriness and anchor her in reality. “That nut cousin of yours has asked Rebecca and Jane to help with her sap collecting tomorrow after school. I hope things have settled down enough. I don’t want them involved in this plane wreck business.”

Harriet smiled reassuringly. “Penelope corrected her mistake as soon as she could. You can trust her with your daughters, Andy. You know that.”

“Lyman grounded her today. You heard?”

“Of course.”

“It’s long overdue, if you ask me. The thought of that woman in the skies above this town scares me to death.”

“Andy, she’s a fine pilot. You think of her as the twelve-year-old you pulled out of the lake.”

He grunted, a gruff man who was all bluster. “It’s not something I’ll ever forget. Ungrateful little snot. She was a skinny hothead, kept yelling and kicking because she could have rescued herself. She was half a second from freezing to death, her skin was blue, her teeth were chattering, but it didn’t affect that mouth of hers.”

Harriet smiled. “I remember. That’s what kept her alive, you know. That sheer willpower of hers.”

“It’s also what got her into trouble in the first place. She acts, then thinks.” He sighed heavily, finished his beer. “You know, I was just a kid myself when that plane went down. I helped my father comb the woods for it. I wanted to be a hero. We looked everywhere. The Sinclair family wouldn’t rest until we’d covered every square inch of those hills. If Colt’s Piper Cub was up there, we’d have found it.”

“Maybe not,” Harriet said. “If it was tucked on a hillside amidst rocks—”

“That’s another thing.” He leveled his cop’s gaze on her. “Who’d put a dump on a steep, rocky hillside? Doesn’t make sense.”

Harriet felt her heartbeat flutter. “Andy…”

“If she’s lying, I don’t want to know about it. Honest to God, Harriet. My opinion, Penelope didn’t find anything in the woods on Sunday. She just can’t admit she was seeing things entirely.” He eased off the stool. He looked tired again, as if the pressures of life were too much for him. Then a spark came into his eyes, a touch of the wry humor Harriet had seen in him for as long as she could remember. “Did I hear a Sinclair was in town?”

She giggled into her wineglass. She couldn’t help herself. Andy McNally knew about her fantasy. Everyone in Cold Spring did. Most didn’t believe it, of course. That was to be expected. It didn’t matter to her—it was her fantasy, her life. Her parents had never discouraged her from finding a way to make sense of being left on a church doorstep on a chilly April night. “Yes,” she said primly. “Brandon Sinclair’s son, Wyatt, came up from New York today.”

“He talk to Penelope? Think he believed her?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Ask,” Andy said. “Last thing I need is a Sinclair stirring up trouble in town. Bad enough we’ve got Penelope. Look, Harriet—” He took a breath and shook his head. “Never mind.”

She smiled. “It’s okay, Andy. I won’t make a fool of myself. I promise.”

“It’s not that,” he said, awkward.

But it was, and they both knew it. He asked her to put his beer on his tab, as he did every night, and she told him to tell Rebecca and Jane hello, as she did every night. When he left, she poured herself another glass of chardonnay—an indulgence—and sat in the empty bar, sipping her wine and imagining.

Six

P
enelope was up, dressed and ready to go by seven o’clock. At 7:05 it hit her that she had nowhere to go. Her father had called last night and told her not to show up at the airport for a few days. “Take a break. Get used to terra firma. Then you can reacquaint yourself with washing planes and sweeping out hangars.”

She turned on the “Today” show, turned it off again. She still had plenty of wood after last night’s panic. She built a nice fire in her potbellied stove and listened to it crackle for a few minutes before she was climbing the walls again.

What was she going to do for three weeks?

She didn’t want to get on her computer. Maybe the weirdo would be there again. She’d reassured herself overnight that her nasty message was a simple prank from some nutcase. She would dismiss it. She needn’t mention it to anyone.

She walked onto her deck. It was cold this morning, maybe not even twenty degrees. Twenty-degree nights and forty-degree days were perfect for sap. It’d be running by midday. At least she had Rebecca and Jane McNally coming over this afternoon to help her boil sap.

What to do until then?

This part of the lake was still, silent, motionless beneath the layers of snow and ice, which glistened in the bright sunlight. Here, there were no fishing shanties and few other year-round houses. She breathed in the cold air, imagining summer, boats humming on the water, kayakers and canoeists paddling along the shoreline, neighbors opening their camps for the season.

She envisioned herself in her kayak on the cool, clear water, staring straight down to the sandy, rocky bottom. There was plenty to do in the lakes region during the summer. Even in the dead of winter, she could ski and snowshoe. Now her options were more limited. Maybe she could talk her father into postponing her grounding until warmer weather.

“Fat chance,” she muttered and went inside.

She checked the weather channel. Yes, it would get into the forties this afternoon. Satisfied, she flicked off the television.

It was seven-forty.

She contemplated her options. Spring clean her house. She glanced at the simple furnishings, peered into the kitchen, her bedroom, her study. Well, yes, she could spring clean, but it wasn’t a spring kind of day, not with the thermometer stuck at nineteen Fahrenheit. And who could spring clean with a fire in the wood stove?

She could drive into town and offer to help Harriet and her mother at the inn. There was always something to do. They’d put her straight to work. She could clean, paint, water plants, help in the kitchen.

She could spy on Wyatt Sinclair.

That settled her down. She flopped onto her couch and pictured his black eyes and skeptical frown, the shape of his chest and shoulders under that black leather jacket. He must have chosen the black shirt and jacket deliberately, to square it in the minds of the people of Cold Spring that, indeed, he was a Sinclair. Possibly he’d done it to square it in her mind in particular.

Spying on him didn’t seem like a bad idea.

“Good God, you’d better do something before you get yourself into real trouble.”

She popped off the couch, energized. Ten minutes later she had her hair up in sticks her mother had given her and was crossing the frozen ruts in the dirt road to check her sap buckets. The air was bright and cold under a cloudless blue sky.

Huge, old maples lined the road, looking picturesque and majestic with their galvanized buckets hanging from their taps. Farther into the woods, she used plastic milk jugs, cheap, efficient, not as high a capacity as the buckets but quite workable. She was meticulous about not drilling too many taps—the trees could easily replace the small amount of sap she took. Gravity tubing would be more efficient, but she wasn’t making syrup commercially, just for the fun of doing it.

She checked a few buckets, the void of the next three weeks yawning before her. She
needed
to fly. Didn’t her father understand? She loved Cold Spring, but it couldn’t contain her.

But she’d run out of gas. “I’d have grounded you, too.”

She climbed over the stone wall that ran alongside the road and checked a few more taps, noticing footprints and trampled brush. Possibly Bubba, more likely reporters. They’d wanted footage of the landscape for their reports. They didn’t need to go onto Sinclair land—this was good enough.

Penelope pushed her way through whiplike leafless brush, the snow shin deep in places, barely up to her ankles in other spots. It had melted to the ground around many of the trees. Before long, she’d be out cutting pussy willow.

She heard a movement and stopped, listening. A squirrel? A bird?

Silence. That made her suspicious.

“Bubba?” she called softly.

No answer. If it was Bubba, there wouldn’t be one.

She wondered if he knew she’d changed her story, if he knew she’d told about the plane in the first place. She hadn’t been to his shack. For all she knew, he’d packed up and left before the reporters could find him, before she could renege.

In a day or two, she would go and check on him.

She started back, the cold air and exercise improving her spirits. When she climbed over the stone wall, a man emerged from behind a maple and stood in front of her. She yelled, startled.

He held up both hands, palms forward. “Easy, there. It’s okay. My name’s Jack Dunning—Brandon Sinclair sent me up here.”

She recovered quickly, nodding, as her heartbeat settled down. He was a fit, sandy-haired man in a shearling-lined jacket and a cowboy hat, and if he didn’t fit in the New Hampshire landscape, he didn’t look as if he gave a damn, either. If Wyatt would give her little benefit of the doubt, this man would give her none.

“You’re Penelope Chestnut?”

She nodded again, feeling faintly self-conscious. Had he deliberately snuck up on her? How long had he been out here? She shook off the rush of questions. “I was just checking my taps.”

“Nice little hobby, maple sugaring. I’m kind of partial to the fake stuff myself. You mind if we talk?”

His accent was a curious mix of southern—Texas?—and New York. Penelope tried to relax, not look as if he’d caught her doing something wrong. “No, of course not. I explained to Mr. Sinclair’s son—”

He leveled flat, colorless eyes on her and said patiently, “Wyatt doesn’t represent Brandon Sinclair. I do.”

“Okay. Fine.”

She walked onto the road. The sun was hitting it, the temperature steadily climbing, and the frozen ruts were already softening. Jack Dunning followed her. His rented car was parked behind her truck in her short gravel driveway. She wondered if he’d just arrived or if he’d heard her calling Bubba. If it suited his purposes to tell her, presumably he would.

“I can see why it’s been so hard to find that plane. It’s rough ground up here, lots of rocks, trees, undergrowth, steep hills.” He eyed her, and she decided she’d rather have a thousand reporters tramping through her woods than deal with Brandon Sinclair’s private investigator and his only son. Dunning added, “Of course, that’s if it crashed here.”

“I’ve always thought they made it to Canada.”

“I understand you’ve made a hobby of the crash,” he said.

She wondered who’d told him, instantly hated the idea of him snooping among her friends and family. “I wouldn’t call it a hobby. That trivializes two people’s deaths. It’s an unsolved mystery here in my backyard. I’ve taken an interest in it, that’s all.” No point in mentioning Harriet. He’d probably know everything about her, too, before long. “Look, as I told Wyatt, you’re wasting your time. I’m as sorry as I can be for jumping the gun, but it was a dump I found in the woods, not a plane.”

Jack Dunning studied her with open suspicion. The naked trees cracked and groaned in a gusting wind, and Penelope wished she’d thrown on more than her fleece jacket. She didn’t want Dunning to think she was shivering because of him. “Let me be clear,” he said. “I don’t care what you found. I represent a man who wants to know what happened to his only brother. It’s that simple. I don’t intend to leave here until I’m satisfied you didn’t change your story under outside duress or for your own personal reasons.”

“And how will you be satisfied? I assume you won’t take my word for it.”

A small, humorless grin. “I don’t take anyone’s word for anything. You’ll know I’m satisfied when I get in my plane and fly south. Now, why don’t you give me a general idea of where you found this dump.”

“Out in the woods. Probably on Sinclair land. On a hill.”

He inhaled through his nose; otherwise there was no change in his expression. “Well, Miss Chestnut, that leaves a lot of options.”

“I’d work harder to pin myself down if I’d found a plane wreck instead of an old dump.”

“You’ve been grounded for three weeks. You’ve got time on your hands. Why don’t you and me take a walk up on Sinclair land this afternoon and see if we can refresh your memory?”

“I’m boiling sap this afternoon.”

He grinned at her, winked. “You’re living up to your reputation, darlin’.” He continued across the road toward his car, glanced back. “I’ll come by another time and you can show me your research into Mr. Sinclair and Miss Beaudine.”

“Call first,” she said. “I’ll put on coffee.”

“You’re a pistol, all right. I’ll be in touch.”

Penelope gave Jack Dunning a fifteen-minute head start before she jumped into her truck and raced to town. She had no plan in mind. She knew she couldn’t stay in her house another minute, not with a private investigator skulking around town. As if a Sinclair weren’t enough.

She found Harriet and her mother in the inn’s gleaming, spotless, sun-filled kitchen, chopping vegetables for their famous curried chicken salad. During the off-season, they served a limited lunch menu in the Octagon Room. When the tourist season kicked into high gear, they’d hire more help.

Robby Chestnut carefully chopped a rib of celery at the butcher-block table. She greeted her daughter with a curt nod. Penelope had anticipated her mother’s mood. It was only Wednesday, and so far this week, her only child had gotten lost in the wilderness, brought on the national media and the Sinclair family and earned herself a grounding after one episode too many of inattention. Her mother, Penelope knew, would prefer she do just about anything but fly planes and wander around in the woods by herself. She would rather she chop vegetables and bake scones, help design the inn’s gardens and choose new furnishings and incidentals, learn how to do needlework or just sit in front of the fire and read a book. It wasn’t that Penelope had to take up innkeeping. She could be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, an accountant—anything that didn’t involve her running out of gas at five thousand feet and getting lost on snow-covered hills.

Penelope pulled up a chair at the table. Her mother was two inches shorter, rounder, attractive in a more delicate, feminine way. Her hair was a tone lighter than Penelope’s, liberally streaked with silver these days and kept short. She wore zero makeup. Soap, water, moisturizer, and Robby Chestnut was ready for the day. She’d had two miscarriages before her only daughter was born, and one after. The miscarriages, Penelope often thought, helped her tolerate the natural fight in her daughter. Otherwise she and her mother would probably have butted heads even more often than they did.

“He came down for breakfast an hour ago,” Harriet said from the counter, where she was running carrots through the food processor.

Penelope feigned ignorance. “Who?”

“Wyatt Sinclair. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

Robby continued chopping celery without comment. Some things she didn’t want to know. When they could, her husband and daughter spared her those things. For example, there was absolutely no point in Penelope telling her mother about last night’s e-mail message or this morning’s visit from Jack Dunning. It wasn’t that she would meddle. Robby fully recognized and accepted Penelope as an adult. She’d fret, retreat into paralyzed worry or go out and buy yarn and knitting needles with the hope her daughter would find an alternative to scaring the living daylights out of her poor mother.

“I’m here to help,” Penelope said. “Pop won’t let me near the airport today, and I’m already stir-crazy. I thought I might clean rooms or wash windows or something.”

The two women exchanged knowing looks. They were no fools, their expressions said.

Penelope wondered if her mother had met Sinclair. Best not to ask. “Look,” she said, “I’d be here even if you didn’t have a Sinclair under the roof. But it’s occurred to me—well, what if he’s not really who he says he is? If I clean his room, maybe I can…I don’t know, verify his identity.”

Harriet spun around, paring knife in hand. “Penelope, good heavens! You plan to snoop!”

“Of course, she does,” her mother said, unsurprised. “You don’t believe Penelope would voluntarily clean a man’s bathtub without ulterior motives, do you?”

Penelope snatched up a rib of celery and bit off the end. She hadn’t fully thought this through. Snooping in Sinclair’s room was one thing. Cleaning his tub was another. Still, she couldn’t accomplish one without enduring the other.

Harriet and her mother called her bluff and sent her to the cleaning closet. There were two other guest rooms occupied, one by Jack Dunning, the other by a businessman from Massachusetts who, Robby Chestnut said, had never even heard of Frannie and Colt. Penelope would have to clean their rooms, too.

Well, she told herself, there was no shame in an honest day’s work.

Penelope was almost as interested in Brandon Sinclair’s private detective as she was in his son, but she approached the idea of snooping through Dunning’s things with a bit more trepidation. She wondered if he’d come armed.

She gritted her teeth and did Dunning’s room first. Naturally, he hadn’t left so much as a pair of socks as a clue to the scope of his intentions in Cold Spring. He struck her as the kind of man who trusted no one, including the local chambermaid. She made up the bed, scrubbed the bathroom, vacuumed, dusted and was finished in no time.

Wyatt’s room was just down the hall. Key in hand, Penelope tucked her ear against the closed door before knocking. He was in. She could hear him talking in a low voice on the phone. Sounded like business. She didn’t want him to know she was the one scheduled to clean his room, so she headed to the Massachusetts guy’s room. He’d checked out. No tip. She flipped on the radio and did a thorough cleaning job to a political talk show that set her teeth on edge.