The Man Behind The Mask: How to Melt a Frozen Heart / The Man Behind the Pinstripes / Falling for Mr Mysterious. Melissa McClone
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for Brendan to slow down and squinted at the signs on every crossroad. Finally, she fished in her purse, took out a piece of paper and held it very close to her face.
“If you give me the address, this new car has GPS.”
She contemplated that, deeply suspicious of technology, then reluctantly gave him the information.
He put it in his system. They were headed into the neighborhood that bordered Creighton Creek. A stone’s throw from Hansen proper, the area was rural residential, with a collection of small, neat acreages. Because of the great location, and the land, it was a sought-after area for young professionals who had a dream of children, a golden retriever and a horse or two.
All Brendan had ever wanted, growing up the only child of a single mother, was that most elusive of things—normal. And when he’d been almost there, in a blink, everything was gone. There must have been something he could have done. Anything.
He felt the pain again, of being powerless, and again felt himself watching, wondering if at some unexpected moment he would just break open. If he did, he was certain it would shatter him, that the pieces would be so small there would be no collecting them and putting it all together again.
But no, he was able to focus on the small, old houses of Creighton Creek, which were slowly but surely being replaced with bigger ones. Brendan’s firm, Grant Architects, had designed many of the newer homes, and he allowed himself, as they drove by one of his houses—one with a particularly complicated roofline—to be diverted from the painful realization of the life he was not going to have by the reality of the one he did.
The house was beautiful. The home owners loved it. Again, he had to try and shake that feeling of having missed something.
“I don’t recall a vet located out here,” he said. “In fact, didn’t I take you and Charlie to Doc Bentley recently?”
“Dr. Bentley is an idiot,” Deedee muttered. “He told me to put Charlie to sleep. That there was no hope at all. ‘He’s old. He’s got cancer. Let him go.’” She snorted. “I’m old. Are you just going to let me go? Put me to sleep, maybe?”
Brendan cast Deedee a glance. Carefully, he said, “Isn’t that what we’re doing? Taking Charlie to have him put to, er, sleep?”
Deedee cranked her head toward him and gave him a withering look. “I am taking him to a healer.”
Brendan didn’t like the sound of that, but he carefully tried to strip any judgment from his voice. “What do you mean, a healer?”
“Her name’s Nora. She has that new pet rescue place. Babs Taylor told me she has a gift.”
“A gift,” he repeated.
“Like those old-time preachers who laid their hands on people.”
“Are you kidding me?” He began to look for a place to turn around. “You need a vet. Not a nut.”
“What I need is a miracle, and Dr. Bentley already told me he can’t give me one.” Deedee’s voice was high and squeaky. “Babs’s niece volunteers out there. She said somebody brought in a dog that was deader than a doornail. And Nora Anderson brought it back to life. With her energy.”
Brendan felt his mouth tighten in a hard line of cynicism. One thing Becky and her grandmother had had in common? They loved all things “woo-woo.” They actually believed in what they called psychics and mediums, had frowned at him when he had made disparaging remarks about fortune-tellers and gypsies.
An unfortunate mental picture of Nora was forming in his mind: dangling earrings, wildly colored head scarf, hideous makeup, dark blue eye shadow, a slash of blood-red on her lips.
“Can you keep a secret?” Deedee didn’t wait for him to respond, but lowered her voice conspiratorially, as if dozens could hear. “Clara, over at the post office, told me she thinks from the mail that she gets that Nora is Rover. You know, from the column? Ask Rover?”
He didn’t know.
“You can tell when you read it,” Deedee elaborated, still whispering. “Nora gets right inside their heads. The animals.”
“That must be helpful, so that she knows where to send the energy to,” he said, his tone deeply sarcastic. Deedee missed the sarcasm entirely, because she went on with enthusiasm.
“Exactly! I’m a great fan of Ask Rover, so I knew she was the one who could help Charlie. I don’t drive anymore,” Deedee said, as if Brendan, her favored chauffeur, didn’t know that, “and I can’t hear properly on the phone, so I wrote her a letter, and brought it right to the post office so I knew she’d get it the next day. She wrote me back right away saying she would send me—Charlie—some energy.”
Brendan felt a kind of helpless fury claw at him. Deedee nursed the worry that Hansen’s first home invader would target her. She double-locked her doors. She was suspicious of the checkout girl at the grocery counting out the wrong change! How could she fall for this?
“It worked,” Deedee whispered. “Charlie got better. But then he got worse again, and she wouldn’t answer my letters. I phoned, too, even though I can’t hear, but I got an answering machine. I hate those. No one returned my calls. Then tonight, Charlie’s breathing changed. I’m scared. I know he’s dying.”
Brendan hated it that she was scared, and hated it more that her fear had made her so vulnerable. “Did you send money?”
The silence was telling.
“Did you?”
“A little.”
His GPS system startled them both by telling him to turn right at the next crossroad. Suddenly he wanted very much to meet the person who would use an elderly woman’s fear over losing her beloved pet to bamboozle money out of her.
All the better if they rousted her from a deep sleep in the middle of the night!
He turned right; they went up a road he had never noticed before, and passed under an archway that spanned the road.
A sign hung from the archway, letters painted in fresh, primary colors. Nora’s Ark.
At any other time, he might have thought it was clever little play on words. Or maybe not. He didn’t like cute. He was an architect. He liked calculation, precision, math. He liked figuring out how large a load a beam could carry, and how to make a wall of glass that was structurally sound.
He liked the completely balanced marriage of art and science that was his work. If at the end of the project he always felt, somehow, he had missed the mark, wasn’t that part of what drove him to do even better the next time? To try again for that thing, whatever it was, that was just out of his reach?
Brendan considered himself pragmatic and practical, perhaps with a good measure of cynical thrown in. He was the man least likely to give himself over to whimsy. But given that it seemed to have been raining for forty days and forty nights, he felt a strange shiver along his spine that he was arriving at an ark of any sort.
Below the sign Nora’s Ark was a smaller one, announcing they were supported by the Hansen Community Betterment Committee.
His company was one of the charter members!
He shook off his annoyance, and drove over a wooden bridge that spanned a creek that was still raging with spring runoff, though it was the last day of June. Up ahead, carved out of the mountainous wilderness all around, a white house—almost a cottage—was illuminated in his headlights, surrounded by a picket fence and a yard where yellow climbing roses rioted.
Through the grim, pelting rain a light shone, warm and inviting, from inside, and the house seemed like a welcoming place, not the kind of place where a charlatan who cheated vulnerable old women would live.
Was someone awake? It was probably a good time for chanting and consulting cards. Though why do it if the mark wasn’t there?
Behind