Copper Lake Confidential - By Marilyn Pappano Page 0,63
were working, and their dogs were patients of Stephen’s. They knew Macy, too, and talked warmly with her while Clary narrowed her choice of treat from the entire refrigerated case to a row of brightly decorated cookies. With Liz’s help, she settled on a sugar cookie as big as her head decorated like a watermelon. As Stephen picked up the tray, Joe tossed on a couple of dog biscuits for Scooter.
“You gotta love a place that takes care of their four-footed customers,” Stephen said as he maneuvered the tray onto one of the outdoor tables.
“You gotta love a place whose coffee smells this good.” Macy cupped both hands to the ceramic mug—A Cuppa Joe was big into recycling, reducing and reusing—but all she’d done so far was sniff the steam rising. Could he put a similar supremely content look on her face, given the chance?
He’d like to think so, but Joe’s coffee was hard to compete with.
“Did you sleep well last night?” he asked after dragging a chair to the two-person table for Clary. The kid didn’t bother sitting in it but crouched next to it, feeding Scooter his cookies one half at a time—and slipping a few bites of her own in, too, if the green frosting on Scooter’s beard was anything to judge by.
He looked back at Macy in time to see her shoulders stiffen slightly. If he hadn’t spent much of the past six days with her, he might have missed it entirely. But her hands didn’t tremble as she took a sip of Topeca’s Manzano blend, then set the mug on the table, and her face didn’t show any emotion beyond pure appreciation for a cup of El Salvador’s best coffee.
“I did. It was nice having Clary to cuddle with.” She gazed across the street as a couple of teenage boys jogged through to River Road, then met his eyes again. “But when I got up this morning, I couldn’t find my keys. I leave them on the kitchen island. I always have. But we finally found them on the mantel underneath the wedding portrait.”
He faked an accusing look. “Were you planning to scratch out your faces with the keys? ’Cause I’ve got to tell you, car keys weren’t made for destroying canvas and oil. Now that your brother’s here, we’ll get a ladder and have that bonfire you were talking about.”
Her smile was unsteady. “I don’t remember putting them there.”
He wasn’t sure why that was so important to her, but he shrugged. “You forgot. You were preoccupied. It happens all the time. My mom once found hers in the medicine cabinet, and Dr. Yates left his once in a cat’s crate. The cat and his owner were halfway to California by the time she found them.”
“I’m not normally forgetful.”
He curled his fingers around hers. “But this isn’t a normal time for you, is it?”
“No,” she agreed with another weak smile.
Stephen couldn’t help but wonder why the incident troubled her more than he understood. But if there was a subtle way to ask, he couldn’t think of it, so he just went with straightforward. “Tell me why it bothers you so much.”
Her gaze drifted away—not an obvious shift, as if she didn’t want him to see her eyes, just sort of moving off toward the square, but he would bet his first-ever book tour, if it ever materialized, hiding was exactly the reason.
“You’ll think I’m crazy. The hell of it is, I might be.”
His natural snort faded away. She wasn’t laughing, wasn’t teasing. The smile was just barely there, wobbling, and even with her head turned away, he could see the heat in her cheeks and the glistening in her eyes. He tightened his grip on her hand, not too tight, just letting her know he was there. No matter what.
A long time passed before she looked at him again. “You had a front-row seat for the intruder-in-the-guesthouse show. The night we went to Fair Winds, when I got home, I couldn’t find the contract I’d left in the living room. It finally turned up in Mark’s office. A day or two later, I threw a bottle of his cologne into the trash, and it reappeared in his closet, where he’d always kept it. Then my keys...”
So that was all it was. Worry over incidents that probably wouldn’t mean anything if they’d happened anywhere else. But to happen in the house she’d shared with her suicidal husband, while trying to deal with closing that part of