Where You Least Expect It (13 page)

P
enelope helped her grandmother sit forward so she could put another pillow behind her back. Then she handed her a glass of water and a couple of aspirin.
Good for whatever ails you,
Mavis had said.

Uncharacteristically traditional advice from a woman who made a life out of being untraditional. Something wrong? She would pull a plant out of the garden, boil it, then make you drink it—different plants for different symptoms—hard to remember and even harder to duplicate. But Penelope had spent her entire life studying her grandmother’s homeopathic remedies, then making them to sell to her customers.

Did Mavis’s change of heart mean she should clear the shelves of herbal remedies and stock bottles of aspirin, instead?

Or had the whack her grandmother took to the head knocked a couple of marbles loose?

Penelope carefully sat down on the bed next to Mavis. “Tell me what happened.”

Mavis handed her back the glass, and she put it down on the bedside table. The old woman shrugged her skinny shoulders, which looked even thinner under the large nightgown that Mrs. O’Malley had loaned her.

“Do you need anything else?” Edith asked from the open doorway.

Penelope didn’t have to look. She knew the sheriff was standing outside in the hall behind Edith. But just as she’d ignored him when she’d come inside the house, she ignored him now.

“No, thank you, Mrs. O’Malley.” She looked in her direction. “Could you close the door, please?”

Edith looked uneasily at the sheriff.

“I’ll be waiting downstairs, Penelope,” he said.

He could do what he wanted. She didn’t care. She was emboldened by the truth and the need to protect the two most important people in her life. She didn’t have time or energy to consider the sheriff’s agenda.

The door clicked closed and she looked at her grandmother again. Mavis appeared well enough, but for the paleness of her skin and a huge bump at the base of her skull.

Her grandmother made a face. “What do you want me to say? That it was a mistake to have taken the doors off?” she asked, as defiant as ever.

“No. I want you to tell me what happened.”

She shifted, readjusting the bedding across her waist. “Well, I suppose that’s easy enough. I heard a sound. Thought maybe it was just you coming in, so I got up to see where you’d been and
wham.
Somebody knocked my lights out.”

What went without saying was that, had there been any lights on, maybe the incident wouldn’t have happened.

“Is anything missing?”

“What’s there to take? I don’t think anyone would be interested in the few pieces of old furniture we have left. Or the pictures of your mother. I checked your door before I left to come here and it was still tightly locked, so they didn’t take anything from there.”

Fear waded up in Penelope’s throat. She didn’t like the sound of this. She didn’t like it at all.

One of the benefits of living in a town the size of Old Orchard was that violent crime was practically nonexistent. She couldn’t remember the last time there had been a murder or a rape. Graffiti on the high school wall? It was probably the Polaski twins. Mowed over rural mailboxes? The Dunwoody boys were up to their old tricks.

Mavis getting blindsided?

Aidan’s brother Davin was making his move.

Penelope rubbed at the tension knot building up in her forehead. But what move was Davin making by accosting her grandmother? It didn’t make any sense.

“You know something,” Mavis said simply.

Penelope looked up to find the old woman staring at her.

“You know who did this, don’t you. Who knocked my lights out.”

“I think the correct term is ‘punched your lights out,’ Gram, and since you weren’t punched, your lights are fine.”

“And you’re changing the subject.”

“There is no subject.” She got up from the bed and paced to the window overlooking the dark and empty street. But was it truly empty? Was Davin out there somewhere even now, watching, waiting?

“It’s connected to Aidan, isn’t it. Some criminal friends of his have tracked him down.”

She looked over her shoulder at her grandmother. “Aidan doesn’t have any criminal friends.” That much was true. But he did have one darkly criminal identical twin brother who shared the same DNA and was capable of Lord knows what.

She turned back toward Mavis. “How’s your cousin in Fort Wayne?” she asked.

“What? What kind of question is that to be asking right now, for cripe’s sake?”

Penelope gathered up the nightgown Mavis must have changed out of and left on the floor, and put it on a nearby chair. “I’m just thinking you’re long overdue for a visit.”

Mavis stared at her. “Oh, no.” She pointed a finger at her. “The first action that happens in this town for half a century and you want me to leave town?” She shook her head. “Ain’t gonna happen.”

“Even if you’re the victim of that action?”

Mavis narrowed her eyes. “Am I? The victim of it, I mean?”

Penelope sighed. “In an indirect way, yes.”

“So this
is
connected to Aidan.”

Penelope wanted to scream. Instead, she walked to the door and quickly opened it, hoping that the sheriff wasn’t listening outside. He wasn’t. She quietly closed the door again and stood there with her hand pressed against the smooth wood.

Mavis’s heavy sigh seemed to suck all the air from the room. “You know, that’s the problem with us Moons. No conflict.”

Penelope closed her eyes. “What are you talking about now?”

She heard the sheets rustle and imagined her grandmother shrugging again. “Peace. Serenity. Living one with nature. That’s what we call living on the outskirts of town. A part of but not active in the community. Keeping to ourselves. It’s all a load of crap. I realize that now.”

Penelope slowly turned to face the old woman, wondering if she’d been hit harder than she’d first thought.

“I’m serious,” Mavis said, holding her gaze. “You, me. Your mother before you. My mother and grandmother before me.” She gestured with her hand. “We studied the cabala. Mapped out the stars. Charted our astrological courses. Experimented with plants. Did yoga. Chanted. For what? For a peace we never really achieved.”

“Gram—”

Mavis held up her hand. “No, no. I think I’m onto something here. My head hurts like the dickens, but I’ve got to follow this through to its natural conclusion.”

She stopped talking, and Penelope did as her grandmother had requested and waited, feeling the woman might actually be hiding a point somewhere in her words.

“Without conflict, there is no true life.”

Penelope shivered. She absently rubbed her bare arms to smooth the goose bumps rising there.

“We get up at the same time every morning, go to bed the same way. We eat the same foods, boil the same herbs. Season in, season out, we’ve become more predictable than those we think we’re trying to be better than.” Mavis wasn’t really looking at Penelope anymore, rather she appeared to be searching her mind. “We don’t have friends. Neither of the female nor male variety. Oh, no. To do so would disrupt our biorhythms. Shatter the peace…” Her voice drifted off. “Waiting to die. That’s all we’re doing. Biding our time until the big pink Cadillac in the sky comes for us.”

Her eyes seemed to focus again. “But we’re already dead, aren’t we? In a sense, we’re the walking dead.”

Penelope looked away, unable to hold her grandmother’s gaze.

“I don’t know what you’re involved in or what Aidan’s involved in. But follow your heart, Popi. Don’t hide anymore. Go for what you want and hold on to it with both hands.”

Penelope’s knees felt suddenly incapable of holding her. She felt Mavis staring at her.

“Tell me. Tell me what’s going on. Make me feel alive again. Make me feel that tomorrow the sun won’t rise in the same spot. Make me feel we’re part of the living.”

Penelope stood quietly for what felt like a long moment, unsure how to respond to her grandmother’s request, her heart pounding loudly in her ears.

Then she crossed the room, sat on the opposite side of the bed and proceeded to tell Mavis everything.

An hour and a half later Penelope tucked the sheet around her grandmother’s sleeping form and quietly left the room. She had no idea what time it was but knew it was late. She made her way silently down the stairs, careful not to wake Mrs. O’Malley, only to find the sheriff dozing in a chair near the front door.

She paused. To wake him or not to wake him. That was the question.

She reached out and touched his shoulder.

He jerked awake so suddenly he made her jump.

“You, um, must have fallen asleep,” she said quietly.

“What time is it?” He glanced at his watch.

Penelope crossed her arms over her chest, watching him rub the sleep from his eyes and get up to face her.

“Where’s Aidan Kendall, Penelope?”

She told him that Aidan was at the motel on the opposite side of town.

He shook his head. “No, he isn’t. My men drove over about an hour ago after Mrs. O’Malley finally gave in and told us where he’d been staying—and he was long gone. No trace.”

Penelope’s heart skipped a beat. “Then, I don’t know where he is.”

He grimaced at her.

“All right, then.”

He was moving to open the door when Penelope touched his arm. “Wait—” She looked through her purse for the printouts from the motel and held them out to him. “Aidan…Allen didn’t do what he’s accused of, Sheriff.”

“That’s for a judge and jury to decide, Penelope. Not you or me.”

Penelope held the papers out farther. “Just look over these, will you? And if you have any questions, you know where to find me.”

“You’re going back to the house?”

She nodded. “Where else would I go?”

She breathed a mental sigh of relief when he took the papers and put them in his front pocket.

“Let me give you a lift.”

And the endgame begins…

Aidan tried to stretch the tension from his neck, hating to think of all this as a game. But to catch Davin, he had to think like him, and he suspected this was all a game to his brother. A dark and deadly game—and Davin was now the target.

Dawn had broken and he’d spent the night in the front seat of his car, parked to the side of the road and behind a thicket of trees across the street and slightly up the road from Penelope’s house. He’d watched the sheriff drop her off at around two a.m., then had heard banging. He’d gotten out of the car and rounded the house in the dark, watching as Penelope boarded up the back door, then lifted the hammer to do the same to the front. Only, she’d had second thoughts and instead blocked the opening with a sheet of plywood that left a couple of inches open at the top, then moved furniture behind it.

He hadn’t dared fall asleep. The sheriff’s office had obviously made the connection between Aidan Kendall and Allen Dekker, evidenced by the squad cars he’d watched swoop down on the motel in his rearview mirror as he drove down the road in the opposite direction. The timing dared him to think that luck was on his side. He squinted up into the lightening sky and wondered if, perhaps, someone was looking out for him.

He clenched his teeth, thinking of the life he once knew, the woman he once loved, the family he once had. All of it lost now.

Penelope had helped heal him with her gentle touch. He knew a part of him would always love his late wife, knew she’d always be with him. But he was coming to learn that that didn’t mean he couldn’t love again. In fact, it was the memory of that love that compelled him to want to love again.

He smiled faintly. Kathleen would have liked Penelope. She would have been fascinated by her quirkiness and would have talked her into letting her natural beauty shine through instead of hiding it behind muted cotton dresses.

But if Kathleen were alive, he never would have met Penelope.

He ran his hands roughly over his face, pondering the strangeness of life and the way it worked. The future was a road that twisted and turned, forcing a change in scenery and lifestyle and outlook, turning the truth into lies and the lies into truth.

And what was the truth now?

He had to find Davin before his twin found him.

And before the sheriff could put him behind bars where he would never be able to prove his innocence and make the man who had taken so much from him pay for his unforgivable crimes.

He heard a loud noise and snapped upright. Across the street Penelope was moving aside the board she’d placed in front of the door. She stepped out onto the porch—looking more beautiful than the last time he saw her—and squinted up into the sunrise, then reached down to pat Max, who had come out of the house to stand next to her.

Aidan’s heart hurt just looking at her.

And his hands itched with the overwhelming desire to touch her.

She disappeared back inside the house, then reappeared moments later with Max’s leash—heading off, he suspected, to her shop.

The normal action caught him off guard as he watched her walk down the road against the traffic.

He’d known deep down that she wouldn’t leave town, even though he’d made her promise that she would. If they had planned for her to stay, he probably would have counseled her to go about her life much as she did every day. Because if Davin was watching—and Aidan was sure he was—he would be looking for any breaks in routine. Planning for them. Then acting on them.

“Smart move, Penelope,” he was surprised to hear himself say aloud.

So long as she stuck to her routine, she would be safe.

Still, that hadn’t stopped him from making a quick phone call to the sheriff’s office earlier that morning and asking them to keep an eye out for her—even though the squad car driving by every half hour put him at risk.

He turned the key in the ignition and listened as the old Chevy revved to life. Now it was time for him to start some looking of his own….

T
he hardest thing Penelope had ever done was to go on pretending her life wasn’t turned upside down. She’d gone to the shop a little earlier than normal, had tried like crazy to lose herself in the packaging of soaps, the filling of sachets and the mixing of potpourri, all the while with her eye on the street outside, her ear listening for the telephone’s ring and her heart solidly with Aidan, wherever he was.

Late in the afternoon, as she made her way toward St. Joe’s for the last Fourth of July planning meeting, she wondered if anything would ever look the same to her again. She couldn’t even remember the woman she’d been just a week ago, the one with her eyes firmly on the sidewalk in front of her, not daring to look to the left or the right for fear of what she might find there. Not that there had loomed a real fear then. She knew how stupid she’d been before, now that there was a real fear in the form of Aidan’s twin brother Davin. A man who had wreaked havoc on Aidan’s life, harmed her grandmother and was capable of doing only Lord knew what now.

She tucked the bag that had held the clothes she’d just dropped off at the dry cleaner’s into her purse, then tugged on Max’s leash—he was considering lifting his leg, appropriately enough, on the fire hydrant outside the sheriff’s office. She looked through the front glass at George Johnson and met Sheriff Parker’s gaze. He nodded briefly and she nodded back, mildly surprised that he didn’t come out to grill her again over Aidan’s whereabouts.

Then again, she’d been there in plain sight all day. Except for a short while after ten when she’d gone to Mrs. O’Malley’s house to check on Mavis.

She shook her head.
Mavis.
Would there come a time when the old woman wouldn’t surprise and shock her? She’d gone to the bed-and-breakfast expecting…well, she hadn’t known what to expect. But not anywhere on the list was finding her with Edith O’Malley, drinking coffee and demolishing cream puffs in the kitchen, laughing about something Penelope wasn’t privy to and wasn’t sure she wanted to be because it had something to do with the shape of the sweets they were eating and the male anatomy.

She’d like to say that her grandmother looked normal. But
normal
wasn’t a word she would place in the same sentence as
Mavis.

Given what her grandmother had done to the house, she had half expected her to be taking apart Edith’s kitchen table, tossing her geraniums in the garbage or pounding holes in her walls. Instead she looked—Penelope reached for the right word—happy.

She slowed her step. Is that what it was? Was her grandmother finding a stretch of happiness in a lonely life that she had questioned only the night before?

If so, what did that mean for Penelope?

She picked up her step again and turned the corner, caught up short when Max stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. She stared at him, puzzled.

“What is it, Maxy boy?” she asked, crouching down to pat the dog.

He growled, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

Icy fear crept down Penelope’s back. Never once in the two years since she’d found Maximus abandoned on her front porch had she heard him growl.

She anxiously scanned the street in front of him, wondering if he’d seen a squirrel or a cat other than Spot. She hoped for something, anything other than the possibility that Davin Dekker was lurking in the early evening shadows.

No squirrel, no cat, not even a blowing leaf.

Penelope swallowed hard. Then she stiffened and slowly stood. She didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. But that meant absolutely nothing. While Max hadn’t proven himself an exemplary watchdog, she trusted his instincts. If he thought there was a threat nearby, then there was. But she didn’t think that threat would materialize in the form of Davin Dekker standing directly before them. No. His advance would be more insidious.

She checked for traffic, then tugged on Max’s leash to force him across the street with her to St. Joe’s. She concentrated on the way she moved, making her movements slow, normal, as she fastened his leash to the bike rack outside the gymnasium door. As she entered she left the door open so she could see—or at least hear—him when she went inside.

The large room went silent as the people gathered around the table at the opposite side of the room looked at her.

She held her breath. She’d completely forgotten that she was still little more than a stranger among these people she’d known all her life. That the last meeting had been her first and that they might not have expected her return. Or that with all that was going on in her life, the last place they expected to see her was there, casually taking part in arranging a holiday celebration.

Perhaps she’d been wrong to come here. Maybe she should have gone straight home. Or stopped by Mrs. O’Malley’s to see if Mavis was still there.

Or tried to find Aidan.

A chair leg screeched against the polished wood floor, and suddenly everyone gathered at the table seemed to get up as one to approach her. Women hugged her, men greeted her, they all asked about Mavis’s condition, they all asked about Aidan. But foremost, they made her feel connected to each and every one of them in a way she’d never expected or experienced before. They included her as part of the community she’d voluntarily spent a lifetime on the fringes of.

Mrs. Noonan loosely took her arm and led her toward the table. “We were all so sorry to hear about Mavis, Penelope. We trust she’s going to be all right?”

“Define ‘all right.’“

Mrs. Noonan gave her a surprised look, then laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

Penelope nodded. “Yes, she’s going to be all right.”

“Have they caught the man who did it?” someone else asked.

Penelope shook her head as she took the seat they’d kept open, only afterward realizing that it was the one Aidan had sat in at the previous meeting. “No, they haven’t. So I think everyone should be a little extra careful until they do.”

Elva snorted from the far end of the table where she’d stayed put since Penelope entered the gymnasium. “I say Aidan Kendall is the only stranger in this town.”

The room fell dead silent.

Penelope quietly cleared her throat. “Mr. Kendall was not involved in the attack, Elva.”

“How could you know that?” the crotchety woman demanded.

Penelope lifted her chin. “Because he and I were together at the time of the break-in.”

“Together as in…” someone else led.

Penelope felt her face burn. “Together as in none-of-your-business together.”

Again, silence.

Penelope wondered if they would notice if she crawled under the table and stayed there for the remainder of the meeting.

“Go, Penelope,” Jeanette said, punching the air with her fist.

Penelope giggled. Something she’d never done until Aidan had touched her and transformed her life and her outlook.

Avoiding everyone’s gazes, she shuffled through the notes she’d brought along with her from the last meeting. Only after she’d read the last one did she realize that no one was saying anything.

She looked up to find them all staring at her.

It took her a minute to realize that they weren’t focusing on her because her hair was messed up, or because she had a ginseng tea mustache or because they wanted detailed information on exactly what she and Aidan had been doing together last night. Rather, they expected her to lead the meeting.

“Oh,” she whispered.

Then, with a quiet clearing of her throat, she did just that.

An hour and a half later, the last of the plans had been sewn up. Each of them had volunteered and been assigned a job to do tomorrow, to decorate Lucas Circle and get the play list to the high school band, and Penelope felt a hollow sense of satisfaction. During the entire ninety minutes her attention had constantly drifted to the open door, and Max had been sitting just beyond, on alert, his
gaze fixed on something outside her line of vision. And with every sweep of the second hand on her watch, she was acutely aware that Aidan was out there somewhere, alone.

Quiet conversation between the members ensued, making Penelope feel as if she’d stepped into a bizarre scene from the play
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Everything appeared so normal, mundane, when to her and Aidan things were anything but.

She was stacking her notes neatly, not looking forward to the walk home, when a thought occurred to her. She looked around the table from one to another of her fellow board members…no, her neighbors, and quietly cleared her throat. One by one they turned their attention to her.

“I want to ask a favor of you all,” she began. And she made her first plea ever for help from people outside her immediate family.

Aidan sat in his car parked in the back corner of Dunwoody’s Used Cars lot, which had closed at five, his gaze focused unwaveringly on the door to St. Joe’s gymnasium. The skin of his neck prickled, as it had for the past hour and half when he’d followed Penelope there. He knew Davin was nearby. Knew it with everything in him.

What he had yet to ascertain was whether his twin was following him or Penelope.

Max’s barking jerked his gaze to the large canine that had sat at attention since the moment Penelope had gone inside the gymnasium. He’d never known the dog to bark. Not once. He watched as Penelope came outside with the rest of the group, each of them seeming to linger by her side before drifting off to go home.

“Ask someone for a ride, Penelope,” he whispered.

He glanced at the plum-colored sky on the western horizon where the sun had disappeared behind a bank of low-lying clouds. He didn’t like the thought of her walking on the unpaved shoulder all alone in the dark, especially under the circumstances. Because if something were to happen to her…

She smiled and nodded at Mrs. Noonan, then followed the older woman to her car, Maximus in tow.

Aidan closed his eyes and let out a deep sigh of relief. Thank God.

All day he’d checked the local hotels and motels, asking personnel if he looked familiar to them, all the time avoiding detection from the law. There hadn’t been a single sign of recognition anywhere he went. Was Davin traveling with someone? He found the possibility unlikely. Davin had been consumed for so long with evening some fictional score between them that he’d never really lived his own life. He lived only to make his twin’s life a living hell.

And he’d succeeded admirably.

Aidan cursed under his breath. “Not anymore, little brother. Not anymore. You and me, we’re going to have this out, once and for all.”

What remained was where and when. And the question of whether he’d be the one to determine that or if Davin would. Allowing, of course, that Sheriff Parker didn’t catch up with him first.

He watched as Mrs. Noonan drove out of St. Joe’s parking lot, Penelope seated in front, Max in the back. Once they were out of sight, he reached down and switched on the ignition, then turned in the opposite direction, away from St. Joe’s…and Penelope’s house.

Penelope had Mrs. Noonan leave her off at the old bridge spanning the Old Valley River, explaining that she wanted to exercise Max a bit before they got home or else he would keep her and Mavis up all night with ceaseless barking. An untruth to be sure, but she wanted these few moments to herself on the bridge before she went home to an empty house. Or worse, to a house that held an ever-changing Mavis.

She waved as Mrs. Noonan made a U-turn and headed back to town. Then she crossed to the middle of the wood bridge, Max’s nails clicking against the surface as he walked next to her, still on alert.

The sky was just light enough to reflect off the gurgling water disappearing under the bridge and coming out over an outcropping of rocks on the other side. She gripped the hand railing and leaned heavily against it, taking a deep breath of the cool air, the lush vegetation and everything that was reassuringly familiar to her.

Max barked and strained against his leash, nearly pulling it from her hand. She tightened her grip and quietly shushed him. She just needed this one moment to gather her wits—

“I’ve been waiting all day for an opportunity to see you again.”

Penelope started, putting her free hand over her heart as she turned toward the sound of the voice she would recognize anywhere.

“Aidan!” she breathed. He stood a couple of feet away, his hands in the pockets of his Dockers, his grin making her flush from head to foot. Then she rushed to embrace him. She’d been so afraid she wouldn’t see him again. So concerned that he would disappear and she would never know what had happened.

Suddenly she remembered where they were and the danger of his being spotted. She pulled away.

“Someone might see you.”

He shook his head. “No. I made sure I wasn’t followed.”

She smiled. “Good.”

Max tugged on the leash she held, backing away from Aidan. She briefly considered the dog’s strange behavior, then stumbled back to Aidan. She turned toward the water, remembering the first time they’d met here. The first of many meetings that had turned her inside out and transformed her into a woman she no longer recognized in the mirror. The old Penelope had appeared older than her years, with pale skin, empty eyes and single-minded determination to make it through the day.

Now…

Now her hair seemed to shine more, her eyes were alive with love, and every moment of her day was filled with yearning for the man next to her, making her forget the time or what she should be doing…

Max continued to strain against his leash, his barking dropping off to a low growl.

Penelope frowned. “Max!” She said to Aidan, “I don’t know what’s gotten into him. He’s been acting strange all night.”

Aidan grinned. “That’s all right. Hey, boy, don’t you remember me?”

Max snapped at Aidan, and he took a small leap back.

“Whoa. I’d like to keep the hand if it’s all the same to you.”

Penelope suddenly felt a twinge of uneasiness.

“So, how did the meeting go tonight?” he asked.

Tension seeped from her muscles. Only Aidan would know about the meeting. Unless…