Plain-Jane Princess. Karen Templeton
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frowning at the rest room and his watch. Oh, but it was everything she could do not to break into a run—except she would have surely done herself a mischief in these shoes!—but she knew her only chance in pulling this off lay in her ability to feign nonchalance. And so, chomping her gum and feigning her little heart out, she strolled through the terminal, stopping at a newsstand just long enough to collect several paperbacks and at least one leer, and out to the taxi queue.
She sucked in the damp, heavy air like a newly freed prisoner.
Oh, she’d undoubtedly be tracked down, eventually—any first-year detective could follow her Visa card’s glowing trail—but it would still take a while to find her. Undoubtedly, the palace would assume she’d gone much farther than a Michigan township barely sixty miles away.
If she ever got there, that is, since none of the first half dozen or so drivers she queried had the slightest notion where Spruce Lake was. As the minutes ticked by, the nerves she’d managed to quell long enough to get to this point renewed their assault, blasting her nonchalance—timorous to begin with—to smithereens. Her mouth dry as dust, she darted a furtive glance over her shoulder as she approached the next taxi. By now, surely Gyula would realize she’d gone missing—
“Excuse me?” She bent over to speak to the driver, swiping a collapsed spike of hair out of her eyes. “Do you know how to get to Spruce Lake?”
The driver, the human equivalent of a bulldog, eyed her for a moment, obviously taking in her lack of luggage, her jitters, her getup. Her accent, which, due to a number of factors, was more English than Prince Charles’s.
“You from Australia or somethin’?”
“Or something. Well?”
“Yeah, I know Spruce Lake,” the driver said. “Had a cousin lived out that way some years ago.” He adjusted his ample form in the seat, scratched his chin. “Takes close to an hour to get out there, though. And then there’s my time gettin’ back…I dunno…”
“Name your price.”
He squinted at her. “A hundred bucks.”
“Done.” She yanked open the door and scrambled into the back. Even Sophie knew a gouge when she heard one, but haggling could wait until the other end of the journey.
Where she’d be free.
Steve Koleski could feel the music teacher’s worried gaze through the back of his denim shirt. “It’s okay, Mr. L.,” he said, frowning himself at the tangle of wires that had vomited forth the instant he’d removed the plastic cover from the outlet behind the refrigerator. Whoever had done this job—he used the term loosely—should be shot. “It looks worse than it is.”
“I may be old, Steffan, but I am not blind. That is too many wires for such a small area, yes?”
“Shoot, Mr. L.—this is too many wires for Detroit. Damn good thing that outlet sparked on you when it did.” Steve pulled out the mass, which reminded him uncomfortably of his brain that morning, began untangling it. “Coulda been a lot worse.” A shaft of sunlight sliced across the all-white room, warming a shoulder stiff from far too much yard work the day before, as low music with a lot of violins trickled in from the living room. At his feet, one of a trio of fat, black cocker spaniels whined for attention.
Mr. L. snapped his fingers. “Susie, come over here and stop bothering the man.” Then to Steve, “Could I get you a cup of tea while you work? It’s a good forty-five minutes before my next student.”
Steve stopped the grimace just in time. “Yeah. Sure. That’d be great.”
As the old man shuffled to the other side of the kitchen, Steve pulled his wire cutters from his belt, then set to work sorting out the mess as his thoughts drifted, for the hundredth time that morning, to the near blowup he’d had with his housekeeper before he’d left. No matter how many times he explained that things in aquariums go hand in hand with fourteen-year-old boys, Mac’s latest acquisition had nearly sent Mrs. Hadley off the deep end. Nor did he suppose Rosie’s penchant for falling asleep in strange places was sitting any too well, either. The poor woman nearly had apoplexy when she’d turned on the basement light and seen the three-year-old curled up at the foot of the stairs, fast asleep. Of course, she’d assumed she’d taken a tumble and that it would be all her fault and she just couldn’t take that kind of pressure at her age….
So why’d you take the job? Steve had wanted to ask the pinch-faced woman. But he didn’t dare. He needed Mrs. Hadley, even if he—or the kids—didn’t exactly get all warm and fluttery thinking about her. She was the fourth housekeeper they’d had in eight months at a time when the kids desperately needed stability. Something was going to have to give, and soon.
Steve frowned at the wire cutters in his hand. Trying to make everybody happy was a real bitch, you know?
He swiped his forearm across his eyes to sop up a bead of sweat: the instant the rain had stopped, the temperature had begun to climb. “You want a regular two-gang outlet, or four?”
“Four, I think,” he heard over the sound of water thrumming into a teakettle. “A kitchen can’t have too many places to plug things in.” The pipes groaned when Mr. L. turned off the water. “Plumbing’s next, I suppose,” he said on a sigh. The old man’s boiled wool slippers scuffed across worn linoleum; the kettle clanked onto the old gas stove. Then he made a sound that was a cross between a chuckle and a wheeze. “This house and I, we’re a lot alike, you know? Keep patching things up, get another couple years out of us. Speaking of which…after you finish in here, would you mind taking a look at the ceiling fixture in the guest bedroom? I think it’s coming loose.” The kettle’s shrill whistle was cut off nearly before it began. “You like sugar?”
“No. Thanks,” Steve said, taking the mug of steaming tea from the prim little man in his gray slacks, white shirt and brightly patterned bow tie quivering at the base of a chicken-skin chin. “The guest room, huh?” He took a sip of the tea, just to be polite. “You got a taker?”
The old man laughed. For fun, he’d registered his spare room with the local bed and breakfast association last year, although, since tourism wasn’t exactly Spruce Lake’s claim to fame, he rarely had guests. Every once in a while, though, somebody’s cousin needed a place to stay while in town for a wedding, or some family would find his listing on the association’s Web site on the Internet and spend a night in town on the way from somewhere to somewhere else. “Yes, Steffan, I got a ‘taker,’ as you put it. A nice young woman who called yesterday, said she needed someplace quiet for a few days, maybe longer.”
A mild tremor of curiosity moseyed on through but didn’t stop. “It will be nice,” the old man continued, “having a little company, especially at night. During the day, I have my students, I can go out…but at night…” He shook his head. “The nights are hard.”
Refusing to believe that sharp right hook to his midsection was some sort of agreement—it wasn’t as if he was ever alone at night—Steve looked down to discover he’d finished off his tea. So he walked over and rinsed out his mug.
“This young lady,” Mr. L. went on. “She sounded maybe…a little lonely?”
Steve shook his head, swallowing down a weary laugh. Honest to Pete—one drawback to living in a small town was that everyone knew your business. Ever since the divorce, no less than a half-dozen people had tried to steer him in the direction of assorted cousins, unmarried daughters, and best friends’ sisters. A half grin tugging at his mouth, he turned around, wiping his hands on a dish towel. “Mr. L.? Just for the record? If things get so bad I’m reduced to being fixed up with a total stranger, just shoot me, okay?” Over the old man’s chuckle, he added, “And how the devil does someone sound lonely?”
A pair of exuberantly bushy brows lifted over the tops of Mr. L.’s glasses. “Just listen to yourself, Steffan. Then you’d know.”
Steve went rigid for a moment there, then traipsed back across the kitchen to the nest of wires jeering