Small Town Secrets. Sharon Mignerey
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because that’s always how it turned out.
Dottie set her briefcase in the front seat of her car, then turned around to face Léa. “I’m sorry I bothered you with this, Léa. He was so positive, so sincere I had to consider that perhaps you were reconciling.”
“We’re not,” Léa said, managing a smile. “It’s nothing more than a misunderstanding.” She feared Dottie recognized that for the lie it was, but needed to reassure both herself and the social worker.
Foley had already taken so much from her She couldn’t let him rob her of this, too.
FOUR
As Léa came back into the house, she wondered how much Zach had overheard. To her surprise, he wasn’t in the living room…or in the kitchen. Then she saw him through the large multi-pane window that overlooked the back yard. He was sitting at the picnic table under the enormous cottonwood tree in the middle of the yard. The big tomcat that visited her every day sat on the table. Both of them faced the house as though they were waiting for her, a thought that somehow cheered her.
When Zach looked up, she waved, and he stood in a fluid movement and came back toward the house. Tail in the air, the cat headed in the opposite direction.
Admitting to herself she was glad he had waited, she held open the door for him. Remember? You were going to be merely polite. She remembered. Right now…right now, she wanted—needed—a distraction.
“Ready to put me to work?” he asked, gesturing toward the drill.
“I am, though I imagine you have other things to do, especially since I kept you waiting.” There. She had made the offer, and he could leave if he wanted. He was off the hook.
“It’s not a problem.” Zach’s gaze took in the sky-blue color of the kitchen, the rustic, redbrick fireplace and the print curtains at the windows. “I visited here with Aunt Sadie a couple of times years ago.” He gestured toward the tree in the backyard. “The tree is a lot bigger, but I remember this room. Your grandmother made great oatmeal cookies, if memory serves.”
Léa grinned. “That she did, and I have the family recipe. I might even be persuaded to bake some for you.”
“Yeah?” He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had offered to cook for him.
“Yeah,” she agreed, as she led the way into the living room where she closed and locked the front door. “I thought we’d start in here.”
Zach thought the beige living room looked as though it was in a completely different house. The room was mostly empty, as though furniture had been taken out and never replaced. A couple bookcases filled with books and CDs lined one wall, and an old-fashioned rocking chair sat next to the window. The neutral colors didn’t seem at all like Léa.
He waved in the direction of the walls. “I was expecting more of your rainbow colors.”
Her smiled faded. “That was…” Firming her jaw, she added, “a mistake. When I was little, this room was painted yellow, and even on the gloomiest winter day, it was like coming into a sunny room. Gram had this big flowered couch and a handmade rag rug. Not to mention enough knickknacks to open her own gift shop.” Léa’s expression grew pensive. “She said the yard was too much for her to keep up, and so she gave me the house for a wedding present. Foley didn’t especially like what I had done with the rest of the house, so I told him he could do whatever he wanted in this room. He had an ugly black recliner and an even uglier couch that, thank goodness, he took with him when he moved out. That’s when my grandmother changed the paperwork and put the house solely in my name.” She glanced around. “I bought paint a couple of weeks ago, and I’m going to repaint within the next week or two.”
“In your spare time.” For a split second Zach thought about offering to help her before reminding himself he now had another reason to stay away from her. A woman trying to adopt a child needed to keep her distance from an ex-con like himself.
She nodded and a generous smile lit her face again. “Yeah, then.”
“I must have been somewhere in my teens when I was last in this house. I remember your grandmother’s cookies, but…” He paused and looked at Léa. “I don’t remember you.”
“I don’t remember you, either. How old are you?” she asked.
“Thirty-six.”
She grinned. “You don’t remember me because I’m eight years younger. A seven- or eight-year-old girl wouldn’t even register on a teenage boy’s radar screen.”
He laughed. “Let’s hope not. Where’s your grandmother now?”
Again, Léa’s face lost its animation. “She had a stroke seventeen months ago, and she broke her hip. That’s healed now, but she’s still not well enough to leave the nursing home.”
“The one here in town…” He waved in the general direction he remembered it being. “A block or so past the hospital?”
“That’s right. I’d bring her home in a heartbeat, but since there’s no bathroom downstairs and since she can’t navigate stairs—”
“That’s a problem,” he finished.
She nodded. “And probably way more than you wanted to know.”
It wasn’t, but he didn’t confess he wanted to know everything about her—from what she had done in Denver before moving here to how she spent her time when she wasn’t at her café to what she dreamed about.
Ignoring the caution light in the back of his brain that was blinking again, he asked, “What’s the plan?”
She fished a couple of slim eyebolts out of the bag and gave them to him. “According to Scotty—he owns the hardware store—drilling holes through the window frame and inserting the bolts is a guaranteed way to keep people from coming through the window.”
People. Her ex. Since she had told Zach that she had just changed the locks, Foley Blue had clearly found some other way into her house.
She pulled the sheer curtain away from the window frame. “Two bolts per window, ten windows in the house.” She glanced at Zach. “Are you sure you have time for this?”
“I have time.”
She let go of the curtain and held out her hand for the hardware in his hand. “No, you don’t. You’re frowning.”
“Not about helping you.”
“So this is your normal expression.” She waited until he met her glance, then turned down the corners of her mouth and her eyebrows into an exaggerated frown.
He grinned at her silly expression. “Something like that.”
She smiled back. “Much better.”
How could she smile, he wondered, given that she wouldn’t be barring herself into her house if she wasn’t worried?
“Want something to drink?” she asked. “Iced tea? Lemonade.”
“Whatever you have.”
“I’ll be right back.”
Zach took the two minutes she was gone to examine the wood frame on the windows. The plan for securing them was deceptively simple. Effective. Nearly as effective for keeping herself locked in as bars would be. He hated that she was imprisoning herself. To get in, a person would have to break a window.
“Maybe you should opt for an alarm system,” he told her when she returned and handed him a tall glass of iced tea.
“That’s in the works, too. But, this isn’t like a city where you call and they come the same day. Scotty can do it, but he doesn’t carry the parts, plus he’s got to come over to see exactly what he needs, order the stuff, and then install it…that’s a couple of weeks away.”
“Unless