Chapter 9
After a late lunch at the houseboat—peanut butter and jelly for me, cat food for Eddie—I drove to the boardinghouse to pick up a few things.
“You do this every year,” Aunt Frances said. She was sitting at the kitchen table, paperwork spread out around her.
“Four years in a row,” I answered cheerfully. “Moving with the seasons, out with the old winter, in with the new spring, opening myself up to new horizons and new adventures, opening my bedroom here for new boarders.”
“No, I mean every year you leave things behind.”
I looked at the cardboard box into which I’d been tossing items. A book, a magazine, a handful of hair bands, a comb, a bottle of liquid soap that had been a Christmas present from my sister-in-law, and a package of instant oatmeal. “Not a lot, percentage-wise.”
She laughed. “I’m just saying that maybe it’s psychological. That you leave things behind because you want to come back.”
“Well, of course I want to come back. You’re my favorite aunt in the entire world.”
“I’m your only aunt,” she said.
“True, but even if you weren’t you’d still be my favorite.”
“And you know this how?”
I grinned. “Going with the odds, that’s all. You’ve met my uncle, haven’t you?” My mom’s bachelor brother was a fine man, but there were common qualities in everyone born to the Rivard family, including my mother, and a keen sense of the absurd was not one of them.
Aunt Frances nodded, conceding my point. “Speaking of favorites, how’s Tucker doing?”
“Fine,” I said vaguely, repacking the box. Which didn’t need repacking, but with any luck she didn’t know that. My aunt, however, had the eyes of an eagle and suddenly didn’t seem very interested in her paperwork, so a fast distraction was needed.
“Ash Wolverson stopped by the marina the other day,” I said. I’d found out last fall that Aunt Frances was a friend of Ash’s mother.
“He’s a nice boy,” my aunt said.
“Boy” wasn’t a term I would have thought applied to the very masculine deputy, but whatever.
“Are you two becoming friends?” she asked.
I’d met Ash last year, during the bookmobile’s maiden voyage, but almost all of our interactions had been law-enforcement-based. “I doubt it,” I said. “He asked me out.”
“And you turned him down?” Aunt Frances frowned.
“Of course I did.” I frowned back. “I’m dating Tucker.”
“Exclusively?”
I looked at her. “Aunt Frances, what’s going on here? No, don’t deny it, I know from the way you’re pursing your lips that you’re holding back on me. What aren’t you telling me? Have you heard something about Tucker?”
She blinked at me. “Good heavens, no. How would I hear anything about him?”
“Because you have amazing powers that, thankfully, you use only for good. And you have a vast network of contacts. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d been getting reports from a former boarder all winter about Cade’s recovery.”
Smiling, she said, “You make me sound like a spymaster. A career choice I never considered. But to answer your question, what I’m holding back is about Ash. Though it’s an old story, and public knowledge, I still feel a little squirmy telling you.”
“Then don’t,” I said promptly. “I don’t want you to feel squirmy.”
And I certainly didn’t want to feel squirmy myself, the next time I ran into Ash. My face warmed a little as I pictured a physical running-into episode: Minnie, trundling head-on into the sturdiness of Ash, his hands gripping my shoulders to keep me from falling to the ground, my face turned up to his. A nice image, but I was seeing Tucker. Every once in a while.
Aunt Frances sighed. “No, I think you need to know.”
“Okay.” I pulled out a chair and sat. “Spill.”
She toyed with the corner of an envelope. “I met Lindsey, Ash’s mother, the first year I moved here. I know you don’t remember Everett very well, but he and Lindsey’s husband had grown up next door to each other and were good friends up until the day Ev died.”
“So you got to know Lindsay because Uncle Everett and Ash’s dad hung out together?”
Aunt Frances nodded. “Dinners, card games, cookouts. You know the kind of thing. Ash was the cutest little toddler imaginable.”
Oh, I could imagine all right.
“Anyway,” she said, “it wasn’t until Ash started to talk that anyone realized there was something wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“The poor boy stuttered.” She sighed. “It was awful. He couldn’t say two words in a row without one of them getting stuck inside his mouth. The other children were horrible to him.”
That, too, I could imagine. “There isn’t a trace of it in his speech now. How long did it take for him to get over it?”
She gave me a long look. “Almost eighteen years.”
I stared at her. “You mean, he stuttered all through elementary school?” I winced. “And middle school?”
“High school, too,” she said sadly. “Lindsey finally found a speech therapist who could help when he was a junior.”
I pictured a younger, shorter Ash. Tried to imagine that Ash being a natural target for bullying. No wonder he didn’t realize how good-looking he was. In high school, the popular girls would have turned up their noses at him. Then I realized a piece of the story was missing. “What happened to Ash’s dad?”
Aunt Frances pushed her papers together in a sloppy pile. “Not my story to tell,” she said briskly. “Do you have everything?” She nodded at my box.
I wanted to ask whose story it was to tell, but let it go. “Everything but an answer to one question. If you can ask me how things are going with Tucker, I get to ask you how things are going with Otto.”
The faintest blush of pink gave her cheeks a springlike look.
“Never mind,” I said, holding up my hand. “I think I figured it out.”
We made our good-byes and I hefted my box. I went out through the dining room and the living room, and it was then that I noticed an addition to the long-standing arrangement of framed photos on the narrow table behind the sofa. Uncle Everett. The same photo that had, until recently, been on her bedside nightstand.
I gave my aunt a silent cheer and headed home.
• • •
That evening, an unaccustomed fit of domesticity overcame me and I went all out in the dinner department, to the extent of stopping at the grocery store and buying specific ingredients.
“Mrr.”
“Lettuce is, too, an ingredient,” I said to my feline critic. “It’s listed right here.” I leaned down and held the cookbook in front of his face. “See? Right there under Caesar salad. And don’t get excited about the anchovies, because I didn’t buy any.”
Once upon a time, Kristen had made me try them, and they were okay, but I knew that if I bought them for this meal, I’d use half a dozen and then the rest would turn moldy in the refrigerator. Unless I shared them with Eddie.
“Sorry, pal. I didn’t think about that. Next time.”
He sniffed at the cookbook, then jumped up onto the back of the dining bench to criticize from a distance, but that must have turned boring because he started snoring five minutes later.
I stirred and whisked and cut and broiled and soon I was sitting at the table with a nice meal of salad, brown rice, and shish kebabs. “See?” I pointed at my full plate. “I can, too, cook. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
Eddie opened one eye, then shut it again.
“Yes, I can tell you’re confused.” My fork went into a marinated and broiled chunk of green pepper. “See, it’s not that I can’t cook; it’s that I don’t like to.”
Eddie’s head popped up. He stared at me with wide-open eyes.
“Yeah, I know. I’ve been scamming people for years with the Minnie-can’t-cook theory. But I didn’t start that story. Because I don’t cook, people assume I can’t. The story grew all by itself.”