The Cottage Next Door (9 page)

Chapter Thirteen

M
ICHAEL STEPPED FRO
M
the shower and did a quick dry off before he wrapped the towel around his waist. The phone rang in the bedroom at the same time he was taking his razor and shaving cream out of the cabinet. Unless Leslie had started up again after being ignored for two days, he was fairly confident it wasn’t her, which meant he probably should check.

He flung himself across the bed to reach the phone on the nightstand before it went to voice mail. Seeing who it was gave him a curious sense of foreboding.

“Hester—­,” he said, making no attempt to hide his surprise. “
Finally
.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch, Michael. Did you get the message I left this morning?”

“I haven’t called the gallery yet.”

“I wanted to know if you could come by my house later today.”

“Of course. What time?”

“Lunch?”

He had a meeting with another vendor who hadn’t been paid. “Around two would be better.”

“Two?” She hesitated. “That would work.”

She sounded exhausted, the way she had when David died. “I’ll see you then.”

“I’ll make you those chocolate cookies you like. The ones with walnuts and powdered sugar coating.” The words were followed by a hiccuped sob.

“Are you all right?” Of course she wasn’t. “Do you want me to come earlier?”

“I’m fine. And two o’clock is perfect. If I’m going to get those cookies made I better get to the market.”

“You don’t have to do that, Hester. I’m fine without—­”

“Please, let me do this.”

She’d been gone an entire week and instead of offering any explanation, she focused on some friggin’ cookies? “Okay. I’ll see you then. Do you need me to bring anything?”

“No,” she said softly. “All I need is . . . Never mind. I’ll tell you when you get here.”

D
IANA STOPPED R
UNNING
and stood with her hands braced on her knees, gasping for air while her calves screamed in pain. Running on sand, even the wet packed sand along the shoreline, was a lot harder than circling the high school track at home. And it didn’t help that she’d put in twice the distance she usually covered.

She took a drink from one of the bottles of water she wore on her belt. Next time she’d make sure Coconut was available. A dog that wasn’t used to running on a leash would be a distraction and bound to slow things down to a more reasonable pace.

Despite her determination not to, Diana scanned the houses sitting at the top of the embankment, seeking the one with the brick retaining wall that she’d decided belonged to Peter. She was looking for Michael. She hadn’t heard from him in two days and feared she knew why, she just didn’t know what to do about it.

A summer fog had rolled in that morning, blanketing the beach and sending the usual sun worshipers inland to find other ways to spend their day. According to Jeremy, the fog would burn off by noon and the tourists would return. But for now, it was just her and the seagulls.

She started to leave when she caught a movement at the house she’d been watching. Even from this distance she could see that it was Michael. He was dressed for work in a brown suit and light blue shirt. The way he moved—­showing confidence but no ego—­took her breath away. She imagined him holding her and closed her eyes to prolong the feeling. Maybe this ache to be held had nothing to do with Michael. Maybe she just missed the feeling of having a man’s arms around her.

She sighed when she saw him get into his car. He hadn’t even sent a glance in her direction. She was invisible.

She wanted their relationship to go back to the way it had been in the beginning, uncomplicated. She hated the dance they were doing, where they concentrated more on making sure they didn’t step on each other’s toes than getting caught up in the music.

W
HEN
D
IANA A
RRIVED
at the cottage, she wandered from the kitchen to the living room to the back porch.

As she had done since she’d first arrived, she stood at the window and stared at the world outside, a world that seemed different viewed from here than from any of the other rooms.

No surprise, she found herself thinking about Michael. He confused her. No, it was how she felt about him that confused her. Everything about him was wrong.

Since eighth grade, bad boys were the ones that had turned her on, the ones that made her care whether she was wearing underwear from Victoria’s Secret or Costco.

Fluttering wings swept by the window. Seconds later a male house finch landed at the feeder. Instead of sorting through the seeds, he hopped to the edge of the tray and waited. A second bird joined him. A female. Diana smiled as they greeted each other and the male stood guard while the female ate.

Attributing kindness and caring to the interaction was considered anthropomorphism by ­people who simply couldn’t accept animals had feelings. Diana refused to believe what she saw wasn’t real. Even in a world of survival of the fittest, there was room for love. And there was room to feel loss.

How could she have had such a low opinion of herself that she’d felt lucky when someone like Howard chose her.

Chose
her? She wasn’t the love of his life, she was his meal ticket, until someone better came along. He’d cost her her home, her pride, and her dignity. Worst of all—­she’d been a willing accomplice to it all.

F
IFTEEN MI
NUTES BEFORE
Michael was due, Hester parted the curtains in the living room to look outside. He was never on time, he was always early. Almost compulsively so.

She rearranged the cookies on the silver serving tray that David’s mother had given them as a wedding present forty years ago. After today it would go into the box of household treasures she’d promised her daughter. Her friend, Josie, had tried to talk her out of giving everything away, telling her that she should wait at least a year before she did anything she might one day wish she hadn’t.

Josie had actually cried when she learned Hester was selling the house that she and David had lived in their entire married lives. Her friends all believed she was leaving Santa Cruz because it held too many difficult memories. In one breath they said they didn’t blame her for wanting a fresh start, in the next they insisted she should wait a year or two before taking such a drastic step.

She could and should go to jail for what she’d done. Nothing separated her from someone who broke into a bank or a house. She was a common criminal.

It wasn’t right, but she’d counted on Peter’s forgiving her once she returned the money.

If she was wrong, at least she was prepared.

Of course none of them knew the real reason she was leaving. She couldn’t face them if they did.

Michael pulled into the driveway. Right on time—­ten minutes early.

D
IANA
DROVE THE
length of Ocean Avenue in Carmel twice looking for a parking place. Next came the side streets that were a reasonable distance from the gallery. Finally she caught a Mercedes inching its way out of a spot on San Carlos. There were benefits to driving a small car with dented fenders: she could get into tight places and no one parked close enough to pin her in.

She got out, looked around at the Mercedes and Jaguars and BMWs and decided it was wasted energy to lock her car. Because she wasn’t in a hurry and no one was expecting her, instead of cutting across at Sixth, she wandered back to Ocean Avenue and looked at the shops.

With few exceptions, Carmel was not a tee shirt and ceramic mug kind of souvenir city. The one-­ and two-­story business and homes looked Hobbit inspired. Quaint, picturesque, charming—­all applied.

She wandered into one clothing store, and then another. This would not be the place she went to replenish her wardrobe. There were galleries and restaurants and wine shops and jewelry stores—­all of them aimed at the upper middle class and above.

She was about to give up when she found the shoe store of her dreams. In addition to really cute shoes, there were handcrafted bags and scarves, some actually in her price range.

If she spent just one lunch hour shopping, out of the two days a week she would be working in Carmel, it would be fifty-­five minutes more than she needed to get into trouble. Slowly, purposefully, she wandered back to San Carlos Street to the gallery.

The building was old brick and tan stucco, with a heavy wooden door painted a dark burnt orange. Mullioned windows were outlined in the same color. Pink and red and blue flowers spilled out of planters on either side of the walkway, and a simple brass plate embedded in the stucco contained the only indication that the Peter Wylie Gallery was inside.

As subtly as she could, Diana removed her phone and took a picture to send her mother. What was on the website really didn’t do the gallery justice.

A bell chimed when Diana opened the door, triggering a smile from a middle-­aged man sitting at a desk working on a laptop. He stood. “Good afternoon. Please feel free to look around, and let me know if you have any questions.”

“Thank you,” Diana said. “I was hoping to see Michael, if he’s available.”

The man frowned. “Was he expecting you?”

“No, I just thought I’d stop by.” She smiled. “I’m the new bookkeeper.”

“Ah—­Miss Wagnor.” He held out his hand. “Thomas Hardy—­no relation to the writer. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

“Diana, please.”

“Diana it is.” He nodded. “I’m sorry, but Michael didn’t say when—­or if—­he would return today. He’s at a meeting. I’m afraid you may have come all this way for nothing.” When she didn’t say anything right away, he went on, “I could call him for you, if you’d like.”

“No, thank you. I don’t want to disturb him.” More disappointed than she wanted to let on, she moved to leave. “Would it be all right if I looked around?”

“Certainly.”

“Could you show me where I’ll be working?”

“Of course. I should have suggested it.” He led her to the back of the showroom and into a small, thoughtfully decorated office. To make up for the lack of windows, hidden lighting poured from behind the cleverly constructed crown moulding. The walls were painted a soft yellow, with pillows covered in vibrant blues, greens, and pinks propped on the two oversize chairs opposite the desk. Two file cabinets, one a bright yellow, the other a soft gray, sat side by side on the back wall. The office was a world apart from the cubicle she’d worked in for the past six-­and-­a-­half years.

“It’s wonderful,” she said. “Can I try the chair?”

He hesitated before answering. “I’ve been told not to say anything to any of our vendors, but since this directly involves you, it seems foolish to make you wait to find out.” He cleared his throat. “Hester has decided to leave early. Basically, the job is yours to start at your convenience.”

“She’s not coming back? Ever?”

“That’s my understanding.”

Diana had counted on Hester for a quick review on the way she operated, and to go over any quirks about the ­people she dealt with. “Did she leave anything for me?”

He gave her a puzzled look. “Like?”

“A list of passwords?”

“I assume you mean for places like the bank?”

“And any other accounts that require them.”

Thomas reached around her and opened an unlocked desk drawer. He took out a yellowed piece of laminated paper and handed it to her. “As far as I know, they’re all right here.”

Alarms loud enough to send an entire city scrambling to take cover in basements went off in Diana. Only this had nothing to do with a tornado. She glanced at her watch. With forced casualness, she said, “Since I’m here, and it’s only a ­couple of days until I’m official, I might as well get started.” Realizing she might be putting Thomas in an awkward position, she added, “Is that okay?”

He hesitated and then shrugged. “I don’t know why not. As I said, Hester doesn’t work here anymore, so she’s not going to care. And it’s not as if we haven’t been expecting you.” The doorbell chimed. “Michael will be glad there’s someone he can count on. I’m sure you know, this has been a bad year for Hester.” He moved toward the door. “I’ll be right outside if you need anything or have any other questions.”

Diana eased into the chair behind the desk. It fit her as if it had been made for her. Good thing. She had a sick feeling she was going to be spending a lot of time sitting in front of the ancient Apple computer. Somewhere in there was the key to finding out what the hell had put a successful business into a nosedive in less than a year.

She didn’t like the obvious answer, especially with the way Peter and Michael felt about Hester.

Chapter Fourteen

M
ICHAEL STAYED
WITH
Hester the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, listening as she relived her fight to save David. She insisted he know what she’d done out of desperation, and how she’d done it. Michael let her talk without telling her that Peter should have been there to hear her confession, not him. Peter was the only one who could give her the forgiveness she so desperately needed.

When Michael finally left, he felt as exhausted as Hester looked. Having his and Peter’s suspicions confirmed didn’t make what would come next any easier. But first he had to deal with Diana. From that moment on, his primary goal would be to get her as far away from the fallout as possible, even if she wound up going back to Kansas, and Peter had to find another bookkeeper. Just considering that possibility was like a punch to the gut. He no more wanted Diana to leave than he wanted to see Hester in jail.

D
IANA WAS DEEP
into following the money trail that had thrown the Santa Cruz gallery into near financial ruin, and didn’t hear the bell signaling someone had entered the showroom. She’d skipped lunch and then dinner, declining Thomas’s offer to bring her a sandwich, and then later, sushi. She had, however, accepted coffee. Too much coffee. Now, either hunger or caffeine had her feeling light-­headed.

A simple comparison between the previous year’s balance sheets and the current year’s was all Diana had needed to figure out that Hester was the reason the Santa Cruz gallery was in trouble. She was a thief. And not a very clever one. On top of that, she wasn’t a very good bookkeeper.

Diana and Peter were going to have a long talk when he got back. Trust was something you put in your wife or your friends, not your bookkeeper. It was a disser­vice on both ends. From then on, Diana would insist an outside accountant went over the books on a quarterly basis.

Hester’s clumsy embezzlement would have been caught by a first-­year accounting student. If Peter had just gone over the books occasionally he would have noticed the anomaly. There were new vendors, paid in even amounts, and haphazardly, without filed receipts to match the billings. Finally, Diana went online and opened the bank statements, studying the scanned copies of the checks. Her heart sunk when her suspicions were confirmed. While the checkbook listed a list of fictional vendors, all of the checks had been made out to, and signed by, Hester.

A feeling came over her that she was no longer alone. She glanced up, expecting Thomas with more coffee. Instead she saw Michael standing in the doorway, his arms crossed, leaning heavily against the oak frame. He looked awful, a somber combination of exhaustion, anger, and sorrow. She tossed her pencil on the desk, and leaned back in the chair. “You knew, didn’t you?”

“I suspected.”

“For how long?”

“I started putting things together a ­couple of weeks after I got here.”

“And Peter?”

“What he knows about bookkeeping you could write on a postcard and still have room for a return address.”

“Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you
do
something?”

“I did. I told Peter that I didn’t believe Hester was leaving because she had this sudden urge to move to Oregon to be with her sister. Something else was going on. He said he would take care of it when he got back.

“But then he gave you the wrong starting date, and you showed up early and we had to figure out how to keep you out of what was going on. The most important thing shifted from protecting Hester to protecting you.”

She pushed away her chair from the desk and stood. “I don’t understand why you thought I’d need to be protected.”

“Because once you figured out what was going on, you’d know that a crime had been committed. Peter was prepared to do whatever it took to keep Hester from being arrested. That left you in the middle.”

Diana’s frown turned into a slow smile as she filled in the blanks. They thought that if she knew, she’d become an accessory. “How were you planning to keep me away from the books?”

“Bribery.”

She nodded. “And how were you planning to bribe me without my knowing what was going on?”

“By offering you the apartment at the gallery. Peter figured you wouldn’t mind waiting to start work if you had something to keep you busy, like getting the apartment ready to move into as soon as Cheryl and Andrew came home. I was supposed to tell you that Hester had requested another week to tie up some loose ends before Peter came back.”

“And I ruined it all by showing up today.”

“I told Peter it was a stupid idea, but he insisted you wouldn’t mind when you found out later. As long as we did what we could to keep you out of it.” Michael shrugged, forsaking his attempt to make their idiotic plan sound better than it was.

The corner of her mouth twitched with an unformed smile. “What if I told you that none of this was necessary? Would that take the offer of the apartment off the table?”

Michael ran his hand across his face and then through his hair. “What am I missing?”

“Embezzlement happens all the time. It’s a crime of need and opportunity that’s rarely practiced by hardened criminals. Few prosecutors want anything to do with it.”

“You mean—­”

“You and Peter, and probably Hester, have wasted a lot of sleepless nights worrying about this. If Peter doesn’t want to pursue it, then it’s over. My recommendation would be to let Hester set up some kind of payment schedule to return what she stole as quickly as she can. It will go a long way to help both of them make the best of a sad situation. They’ve been together a long time. My guess is that neither of them wants it to end this way.”

Michael pulled out an envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. “They won’t need to set up anything. It’s all there. She only took the money because they’d used all their savings and David refused to let her sell the house to pay for more cancer treatments. She managed to convince him that the clinic was going to complete his treatments free of charge because he hadn’t responded as quickly as they’d promised.”

“Oh my God,” Diana said. “That’s so sad.”

“The saddest part is that Hester couldn’t see that David knew he was dying and wanted the treatments stopped. His one wish was to go home to be with her for whatever time he had left. ”

“Peter’s right. She’s suffered enough.”

Michael came into the room and sat on the corner of the desk. “You’re sure about the prosecution thing?”

“Positive. But just to be sure California operates the same way Kansas does, I called around this afternoon to double-­check. And even if you decided to pursue it, there isn’t a prosecutor anywhere who’d want to take that on.”

He gave her a smile that was the best thank you she’d ever received.

“I could kiss you,” he said.

Diana looked deep into his eyes, and was lost in the way he looked back. Her heart on her sleeve that he would say he was only joking, she whispered, “Okay.”

This time the smile he gave her curled her toes. He reached for her hand and brought her around the desk to stand in front of him. Without saying anything more, he cupped her face with his hands, and with slow deliberate intent, brought her forward until his lips brushed hers.

She snaked her arms through his and wrapped them around his neck.

He kissed her again, this time with his lips parted. On the third kiss, their tongues touched.

Diana sighed and fleetingly wondered what he would say if she asked him if he’d ever made love on a desk. Instead, she said, “What about Thomas?”

“I sent him home.”

She kissed him, long and hard. A soft groan rumbled in the back of his throat. All of the baggage she’d brought with her from all of the men who had disappointed her exploded like a balloon filled with brightly colored confetti. Mentally standing in the middle of the downpour, she closed her eyes, swept away by a wondrous sense of promise.

I
N THE COVE,
a three-­year-­old boy rode his father’s shoulders up the steps from the beach, talking nonstop as he had for the past half hour. He’d fought going home the way he fought eating orange and yellow vegetables. It was their last night at the cove, his last chance to hear a mermaid sing. Tomorrow his father would take him back to his mother in Sacramento, and then disappear for another month. Or more. His dad traveled with his job, and the boy never knew when he would look out the window and see him coming. The boy spent a lot of time looking out the window.

The moon was as high as it could go in the star-­filled sky. They only had to wait until the seagulls were lined up just outside the wave’s foam barrier, waiting, too. And then the mermaid would sing. The boy knew this because it was written in the book his grandmother read to him every night before he went to bed.

He couldn’t leave now, not when he was so close to hearing the music that would grant him a wish. It would be his fault if his mother moved away and his father couldn’t find him.

A tear escaped the little boy’s eye and rolled down his cheek. He reached up to wipe it away with the back of his hand, then turned for one last look at the ocean. But it wasn’t the ocean that made him sit up straight and grab his father’s chin to turn his head toward the house at the top of the stairs, it was a soft blue light the exact color of the mermaid’s tail.

“It’s her,” the little boy insisted. “We have to save her.”

The father laughed. His son’s imagination was only one of the hundreds of things he loved about him. Already he felt an intense sorrow that as his boy grew older, their magical journeys would end. The father would be like Puff, the Magic Dragon, left behind by Jackie Paper.

“How do you know it’s her?” the father asked.

“The color. It’s special.” He wiggled to get down. “The book says so.”

The father stopped and stared. He didn’t believe in mermaids or magic, but he believed in his little boy.

“Maybe we—­” The words stuck in his throat as the light flashed and abruptly disappeared. “It’s gone,” he said, more disappointed than he could comprehend.

The boy squealed and clapped his hands. “She escaped!”

The man’s knees grew weak. He reached up, grabbed the boy under his arms, and swung him to the ground. The practical analytical side of his brain refused to believe what they’d seen was anything more than a blue night-­light.

But the side of his brain that rode with his son on a boat with billowed sail knew without question that they had witnessed something too special for words. Instinctively, he knew that this time the magic had been for someone else. One day, the magic would be for them.