Escape (18 page)

I hadn’t known the Siamese, yet the thought of it dying—the thought of the helpless little tabby in my lap dying—brought tears to my eyes. But yes, cats here did die. Same with dogs, horses, and any manner of other pets that were too injured or old to recover from whatever had brought them to the Refuge. Cremated, their ashes were buried in small tins in a cemetery bordering the cornfield. It was simultaneously the most beautiful and heartbreaking spot. Thinking of it, I bowed low over the little kitty, putting my head to hers.

“Emily?”

I looked up into the face of the man I had met last night at The Grill.

“Bob Bixby?” he prompted.

I smiled. “I remember. The lawyer.” I would have said the word facetiously, lawyer to lawyer, if this man had been younger or more natty. His polo shirt was perfect. But his too-short jeans gave him a vulnerable look.

He settled on a low stool nearby and was quickly approached by a handful of cats, which told me that he had been here before. “I wasn’t kidding last night,” he said as he stroked their heads with a knowing hand. “I could use your help.”

“Ohhh, I dunno,” I demurred. He seemed like a nice guy, and I didn’t want to offend him, but I wasn’t here as a lawyer.

“It’s pretty light stuff,” he coaxed, “a few contracts and other things I’d love second opinions on.”

“You have no associates?”

“A clerical-type person, general gofer, but when it comes to law, it’s just me. What’ya say? Give an old man a hand?”

“You’re not an old man,” I said quickly, because age was as age did, my dad always said, and Amelia wouldn’t have hired Bob Bixby if he couldn’t do the job—but that put the bug in my ear. “Amelia would probably rather I scoop litter.”

“Not true. She told me to draft you. She said that anyone who can make it in a New York law firm can lend a hand here.”

A compliment? If so, it brought no pleasure. I hadn’t exactly “made it” in a New York law firm. My continued relationship with said firm was simply because one man there liked me. Or liked my looks.

That said, I had no idea how I could help Bob Bixby. “My specialty is litigation,” I said.

It was a mistake.

“So is mine,” Bob countered enthusiastically. “Then I retired from it, came up here, and found I could do what needed to be done. We’re talking employment issues, risk management, trademark coverage. I studied these things in law school. So did you, and much more recently than me. If I can handle it, you can.”

“Can I?” I asked Vicki that night. We were slouched side by side on a bench behind the Red Fox, the soles of our feet to the woods. The moon was high, the forest dark but for the occasional lightning bug, silent but for the crickets. The humidity was low, crisping the scene.

“You sure can. You can do anything you want, Emily.”

“Should I, then? When I’m with the cats, I’m lying low. This’d be different.”

“You mean, you might see Jude.” She gave a quick headshake, blond ends quivering. “He won’t be there tomorrow. Amelia’s taking
him to lunch with a group of Refuge donors in Concord. She bought him new clothes.”

“Will he wear them?” I asked.

Vicki snorted. “I doubt it. He’s forty, and she’s buying him clothes? How pathetic is that? She’s already said he can wear them or not. My mother is a hypocrite, have I told you?”

“Vaguely.”

“God forbid Charlotte wears jeans to a little girls’ tea party at The Bookstore. Not. Appropriate. Says the Queen. But Jude? Whatever he does is fine. Maybe the reason he’s such an impossible human being is that he was spoiled. She created the monster.”

Pulling my sweater around me, I studied the woods. Monsters? Not here. These woods were distant from Jude’s. They were more tame.

I sighed. “This setting is unreal. Just beautiful. Peaceful.”

“Like New York.”

I chuckled. “Right.”

“Will you go back?”

“That depends on James. I can’t be in New York without him.”

Vicki turned her head against the wood slat. “Of course you can. You’re a strong woman. Leaving last week took guts.”

I still wasn’t sure I agreed, but hearing her say it felt good. “I’ll rephrase that, then. I don’t
want
to be in New York without him.”

“Do you want to be in New York at all?”

“Bingo.”

“Where else?”

I gazed out into the dark. This place was more mine than Jude’s, and the pull remained. “Those woods.”

“I mean, for your future.”

“Those woods,” I repeated. “They are the ultimate hideout.” My eyes crept the length of the tree line, left to right, from the parking lot to the gardener’s shed. I felt Vicki look at me and follow my gaze at the end.

“The shed has charm,” she granted, “but it’s awful close to the woods. Some people are freaked out by that.”

“Like a bear would break down the walls?” I asked, though the question was rhetorical. The shed was small, not much bigger than my city kitchen, but even the most untrained eye could see how solid it was. Massive logs framed the base, while thick planks dovetailed up the sides. The door was oak, the windows small with decorative grates rising halfway. The grates were the work of a local forge, and while, yes, they would prevent a bear from launching itself inside, that wasn’t why they were there. They were there to showcase wisteria and the work of the smithy, who was a Beaudry relative.

“Want it?” Vicki asked.

I smiled. “That’d be a hard choice—the gardener’s shed or heaven.”

“I’ll make it easier,” she said, apologetic now. “I need your room. I have a couple arriving here on Monday. This will be their fourth summer, and each year they stay in the attic. They reserved it three months ago. I’m sorry, sweetie. I can’t tell them that a friend came at the last minute and wanted it, when I have other rooms that are open. You could have any one of those.”

I continued to look at the shed. I had spent part of a summer living there, and that when it truly was a gardener’s shed. A time or two I had imagined that the hose coiled in the corner was a snake, but even then I hadn’t freaked out.

So what did worry me? The same something that kept me from walking into those woods on my own, though I wasn’t sure what it was. Wild animals? Coyotes?
Me?
Was I afraid I would go in and never want to come out?

But hadn’t I gone to Jude’s cabin and come out again?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the gardener’s shed might work. I couldn’t stay in the clouds forever. Moving from the dreamy euphoria of that attic room to the down-to-earth reality of the shed might be small and symbolic, but it was something.

Besides, part of me did want to be close to the woods.

I dreamed of James that night, dreamed he was lying with me, holding me close. I felt the brush of the hair on his legs as they moved against mine, heard the sough of his breathing as he slept, smelled the male something that was his alone.

I didn’t dream of sex; my dream was erotic enough without. We always used to sleep like this, so close that we woke up aching for sex. Lately, it seemed we woke up aching only for more sleep.

When I woke up this night, it was to coyote sounds and a vision of Jude. Bolting up, I scrubbed my eyes, and the Jude on the far side of the room disappeared. The coyote sounds went on.

Falling back, I let my heartbeat steady as I listened, and in time, the sounds, too, were gone.

Chapter 12
 

I didn’t want to work with Bob Bixby. I told myself that repeatedly as I drove to the Refuge Friday morning. I was steering clear of law for a while—steering clear of all strenuous thought.

Unfortunately, in the absence of strenuous thought, I was obsessing about my phone call with James—or about Jude’s face appearing in my room—or about my relationship with that coyote. But I couldn’t get the loose ends to align.

So I returned to considering Bob and the charitable mission of the Refuge and decided that an hour or two wouldn’t hurt. Besides, there was something to be said for Amelia encouraging this. She had issued a challenge and, like facing Jude’s cabin, I couldn’t turn away.

It wasn’t until I reached the second floor of the Admin Building and turned in at the Legal Department that I realized what Amelia was about. Bob’s clerical-type gofer was Jenna Frye.

Amelia must have hoped that would upset me, but as had been the case in the parking lot the day before, Jenna was the one more upset. That relaxed me a little.

“Hey,” I said a bit breathlessly and managed a smile. “How’re you doing, Jenna?”

“I’m okay.” She seemed frightened, though I didn’t know why.
She was the one who had given birth to the heir—not that I had ever aspired to that. My dreams with Jude hadn’t reached the point of kids. We had been about the here and now—and it wasn’t all him, it was me, too. I had been so focused all my life that living in the moment that summer had been the escape.

In a flicker of thought, I imagined that Jenna Frye had saved me from something that might have ended far worse than it had. I wanted children, but not with a dad who was still chasing dreams around the world.

Confident in that, I leaned over to look at the small family photos on her desk. All three of Jenna’s children had her blond hair, but Noah stood out—not because he was the tallest, but because he did look like Jude.

Flickers of thought notwithstanding, I still should have felt betrayed. Hadn’t this child been conceived within minutes of my waltzing in with groceries?

Suddenly, though, it was just a little soap opera about a boy with the same blond curls, the same gold eyes, the same self-assured grin as Jude.

I chuckled. “This is uncanny.”

She seemed to know what I meant. “Yeah.”

“You have three beautiful children,” I remarked, and gestured at the shot that included her husband. “He’s very good-looking. I don’t think I’ve ever met him.”

“No. He’s quiet.”

“Mine, too. A change from Jude.” I suddenly felt a need to say more. “Jenna, if I hurt you ten years ago, I’m sorry. I didn’t know how serious you were about him.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Amelia said—”

“I wasn’t. He said you weren’t either.”

He lied, I thought. But it didn’t seem to matter. I sighed. “It could be both of us found better men.”

I was saved from having to say more by Bob, who appeared with a grateful look and ushered me inside. He showed me the kinds of things that needed to be done, and he was right. There was nothing heavy-duty here. I could easily read the profile of a woman about to be hired to work in the stables and tailor her contract to her personal situation. Likewise, the severance agreement for a retiring buildings worker. These were boilerplate documents written by a specialist in Concord and requiring nothing but tinkering. Editing the prototype for an employee relations manual was actually fun. Likewise, reviewing the witness deposition taken in a case of animal cruelty and generating questions for rebuttal.

Okay, the deposition was right down my alley, but the rest came back with surprising ease. Would I want to work on contracts for a living? No. A contract was a piece of paper. An employee manual didn’t purr. And as for sitting in the same room interviewing someone who abused animals, I had no interest.

Even the most heinous criminal has civil rights, my father said. But I could pick and choose the kind of criminals I worked with, couldn’t I? If I returned to law—not when but if, because as reluctant as I’d been to work here, I had felt a connection—I had to be more discriminating. I was coming to realize the importance of that. Life was about prioritizing.

That said, I did whatever Bob asked of me there, leaving little time to think about James, so I was a bit unsettled leaving the Refuge and realizing we would be talking in less than three hours.

I imagined every negative twist. He would demand to know about my unspoken past and accuse me of fraud. He would tell me that his partnership was being fast-tracked, so there was
no way
he could cut back now. He would ask for a divorce.

By the time I reached town, I was on edge.

And there was Jude on a bench on the green, rising when my car appeared and following it into the parking lot of the Red Fox. All six-four straight, he was looking annoyed by the time I opened the door.