The Dad Next Door. C.J. Carmichael
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sure she didn’t give a reason?”
“Maybe there were signs I didn’t see. I don’t know. But when I say she walked out on us, that’s literally what happened. She said she was going away for a girls’ weekend. She never came back.”
“Did you question her friends?”
“That’s the funny part. She didn’t have any friends. At least none that I’d ever met or heard her mention. She never showed any interest in meeting the people I worked with, and she didn’t seem keen to get to know the neighbors, either. That’s why I was so glad when she said she wanted a weekend away. I thought finally she’d met some women she liked.”
The profile he presented fit Allison’s memories of Marianne perfectly. “She was the same at school. The guys all liked her, but she didn’t really have friends.”
“Except for you.”
“Except for me,” she agreed. For some reason Marianne had chosen Allison as the one person she could tolerate, starting in kindergarten when they’d both gravitated to the craft table. After that, they’d taken art classes together all the way through their senior year.
That common interest had come to haunt Allison, though. She wasn’t very old before she’d realized that although she was good with color and artful arrangements, Marianne was the one with the real talent. An original spirit was what their high school art teacher had called her.
How Marianne had lorded that one over Allison.
Many times Marianne’s friendship had been a burden that Allison gladly would have shed. Her spitefulness had caused all sorts of problems with the other kids in their class. But whenever Allison complained to her parents, her father would be quite stern. He’d point out that Marianne didn’t have a father to guide her, the way she did, and he’d urged her to be patient and understanding.
The fact that Marianne didn’t have a father hadn’t seemed like much of an excuse to Allison. There was another kid in their class who was missing one of his parents, and Scott wasn’t a jerk just because he didn’t have a mother.
But Allison liked pleasing her father, and so she’d stuck by Marianne over the years. Even when her other friends called her a fool.
“Well, whether Marianne had girlfriends or not,” Gavin continued, “she didn’t come home that night. Or any other night after that.”
“So you haven’t heard from her in all those years?”
“Not a word.”
She considered the various implications. “Do you think she knows about what happened to Samantha?”
“Not unless she was still in Hartford at the time and read about it in the local papers.”
“She wasn’t. She’s been living in the White Mountains for quite a while now.” Allison wondered if Gavin was disappointed to hear that. “Were you hoping to find her in Squam Lake?”
“Not at all.”
“It’s not why you moved here?”
“I wanted out of the rat race of the city.”
“There are lots of other small towns in New England.”
Finally, he conceded the point. “I suppose I chose this one because of the ties to Tory’s mother. I thought maybe I’d find someone who knew Marianne. Who could help me locate her.”
“In other words…someone like me.” She found herself resenting the hopeful look he gave her. She and Gavin had been working their way toward friendship, and now—suddenly—Marianne was part of the picture. And she didn’t want Marianne in the picture. Marianne had always changed everything.
“You had to know that moving here was a long shot,” she added. “Why not hire a private investigator to track her down?”
“I considered that, but my brothers talked me out of it.”
“You have more than one?”
He held up two fingers. “Matt’s a lawyer and Nick is a cop—they both live in Hartford. Neither one of them cared much for Marianne.”
Which showed that they had good taste. Allison wrinkled her nose, aware that her thoughts were bitter. Marianne had always been able to bring out her dark side.
“So you let it drop.”
“It wasn’t until Samantha died that finding Marianne seemed imperative. Then, as luck would have it, I stumbled across an old box of her belongings in the attic. Inside were some school papers, including her high school diploma. That’s how I found out she’d grown up in Squam Lake.”
“And you decided to move here.”
“I needed to do something. Tory was depressed. We both were. Too many memories in that house. In Hartford, for that matter.”
“I can imagine.” He had her sympathy now. Losing Marianne was one thing, but losing a young daughter was something else entirely.
“I’d already been thinking about moving. I wanted a small town. Something not too far from my family. Squam Lake seemed like the right answer on several levels.”
What he said seemed sort of reasonable. Except…“You went so far as to buy Marianne’s old house.” That was just a little too creepy for Allison. It was one thing to want to find your daughter’s mother, but it was another to be obsessed by the idea.
“That part was coincidence. I couldn’t believe it when our real-estate agent said the house used to belong to the McLaughlin family. I figured it was a sign.”
And maybe it was, Allison thought. For Gavin, it was a sign that he was getting closer to the mother of his babies. For her, it was a sign that she’d better not get too close to a man obsessed with another woman.
GAVIN COULDN’T BELIEVE that he’d finally found a link to Marianne. Though Allison didn’t seem to have liked her that much, she’d actually been Marianne’s friend. There was something ironic about that, but at the moment he needed to focus on other things.
“Allison?”
“Yes?”
He’d given her an opportunity to ask her questions. Now it was his turn. “Have you heard from Marianne lately?”
“The last time was about a year ago.”
He waited, but she didn’t offer him any more than that. He could tell she didn’t want to talk about Marianne any longer, but he couldn’t let this drop. “Do you have a phone number or an e-mail address?” he pressed.
“When she gets in touch, it’s usually by e-mail. I can give you the last address she used, but it probably won’t help. She lives in a trailer with no Internet access and doesn’t get to town often.”
In the dim light of the moon, Gavin tried to read Allison’s expression. Was Marianne really that reclusive? “I can’t imagine Marianne in a trailer.”
“How well did you know her?”
It was a valid question. “I’m beginning to realize, not that well.”
There was a long silence. Then, almost reluctantly, Allison asked, “How did you two meet?”
He hadn’t thought about that night in years. “It was at an evening reception at an art gallery in Hartford. I can’t remember the name of the artist. The paintings were different. Not my taste at all.”
But though he’d gone to the show hoping to find a gift for his mother’s new condominium and had been disappointed in that respect, the evening hadn’t been a total waste. He’d been about to leave when a beautiful woman had offered him a glass of wine and then introduced herself as Marianne McLaughlin.
Within half an hour he was totally bewitched.
They