Moonlight on Butternut Lake (4 page)

“Can we stop this?” he asked now, addressing the table at large. “Can we stop pretending that Ms. Jones and I are going to become good friends? Because we all know that's not going to happen. If we're lucky—very lucky—we'll be able to stand each other just enough to tolerate the very short amount of time we'll need to spend together every day.”

Allie's face flushed then from some combination of anger and embarrassment, and Mila, Reid saw, was startled. But only for a moment. Because in the next moment she slid down a little more in her chair and drew her shoulders even closer together, as if she was hoping to simply disappear altogether.

“Oh, come on,” Reid said. “I'm only saying what everyone here already knows. I don't want Ms. Jones to be here any more than she wants to be here. I'd like to live alone now. Something, by the way, I'm perfectly capable of doing. And Ms. Jones—well, I don't know Ms. Jones well enough to know what she'd rather be doing—but I imagine it's almost anything but this.”

“But this
is
what I want to be doing,” Mila said, sitting up a little straighter. “Taking care of people, I mean.”

Her apparent sincerity threw Reid, but only for a moment. “Well, you may want to do it, but you can't be very good at doing it,” Reid pointed out. “Because if you were, your agency wouldn't have to send you two hundred and forty miles away to do it, would they? What'd you do, Ms. Jones, at your last job? Steal a patient's fur coat? Or was it their family silver?”

“Reid, that's outrageous, even for you,” Allie objected, and she looked, Reid thought, like it was taking all her willpower not to strangle him. “Mila was referred to us by a reputable agency. And her record, I'm sure, is spotless.”

“Actually,” Mila said, looking not at Allie, but at Reid, “I don't have a record yet. This is my first placement.”

Reid rolled his eyes, ignoring the warning hand Allie had placed on his arm. “Great,” he said. “So you basically have no idea what you're doing. Which means you're going to be even
less
competent than your predecessors. Who, trust me, already set the bar pretty low.”

He'd expected this to silence her, but she continued to look steadily at him before she said. “I can't speak for whoever came before me, obviously. But I can promise you that I've received excellent training, and that I'm fully qualified for this position. So I'll do my best to make you comfortable, Mr. Ford. And, if you're concerned about your valuables, I suggest you keep them locked up. But since you don't strike me as the kind of man who would own either a silver tea service or a mink coat, I don't think my stealing them is a real possibility, do you?”

Reid, surprised, sat back in his wheelchair, but Mila was still staring at him, a challenge in her brown eyes. And then she seemed to remember herself, and she glanced around, nervously, as though she'd said too much.

“Okay, fine,” Reid said, still not quite willing to concede the point. “I won't worry about my valuables. Especially since I don't have very many of them to worry about. But I still think it's strange that you'd want to spend your summer so far from home, with someone you've never even met before. I mean, seriously, if that doesn't smack of desperation, what does?”

“Reid, stop,” Allie said, but Mila interrupted.

“Actually, the reason I chose to come here was because I was ready for a change of pace,” she said. “I've lived in the city all my life, and I thought this might be a nice change, living here for the summer.”

“Change of pace?” he repeated, not bothering to hide his skepticism. “I think we both know that's not why you're here. I think it's much more likely you're running away from something. Or someone. A bad breakup, maybe? Or some guy in Minneapolis who—”

But he stopped when Mila stood up from the table so suddenly that she knocked over her iced tea, and then he watched, silently, as she rushed out of the coffee shop, bumping into a few more tables and chairs on her way out.

“Uh, Caroline,” Reid called out to the coffee shop's owner, who was still hovering nearby, holding the baby. “I think we're going to need your help over here again.”

He glanced over at his brother and sister-in-law, who both looked appalled.

“What?” he said, with mock innocence. “I thought that went very well.”

M
ila was standing down the block from the coffee shop, under the dripping awning of the hardware store, when Allie caught up to her. She'd brought her baby with her—a girl, judging from the pale yellow sweater she was wearing—and the baby, as if sensing somehow how miserable Mila was, smiled at her.

And Mila, trying not to cry, smiled back at her. Even in her present misery, it was impossible not to. Most babies were cute, she supposed, but this one seemed especially so, with her downy brown hair and wide blue eyes.

“She likes you,” Allie said encouragingly.

“She's adorable,” Mila said, watching as the baby now sucked contentedly on her chubby little hand.

“She missed her nap today, in all the excitement,” Allie said, resettling the baby on her hip. “So far, so good, though. But I'm . . .
I'm sorry about that.” She gestured in the direction of the coffee shop. “I'm not going to ask you to excuse Reid's behavior, since, obviously, there is no excuse for it.”

Mila shrugged, but she didn't say anything. She was afraid if she did, the tears would start. She could feel them gathering behind her eyes and burning in her throat. They were tears of anger, and humiliation.

“Look,” Allie said now. “He's not like that
all
the time.
Most
of the time, yes. But sometimes, every once in a great while, he can be
almost
pleasant to be around.” She smiled at Mila, and Mila saw that she was joking.
A little.
Mila tried to smile back. She didn't blame Allie for her brother-in-law's behavior. She and her husband both seemed like nice people. A little overwhelmed, maybe. But nice.

“No, seriously,” Allie said. “He was different before the accident. I mean, don't get me wrong. Even then, he didn't expend a lot of energy on, um . . . personal relationships. But that was mainly because he was a complete workaholic. It was
all
about the business with him.”

“The business?”

“He and my husband own a couple of dozen boatyards, all over the Midwest,” Allie explained. “Walker did some of the work, of course, building their company. But Reid was the driving force behind it. He worked all the time. We're talking sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. And he'd be on the road two hundred and fifty days a year. It was crazy.” She shook her head. “Walker and I visited him once at his apartment in Minneapolis, and I swear, he had nothing in the refrigerator. Nothing. Not even, like, a jar of mustard or something. The only sign that someone even lived in that apartment, as I recall, was some dry cleaning hanging in the hall closet.” She shuddered at the memory.

“Anyway,” she continued, “that was the way he lived then. If he had any friends who weren't his brother and I, or his business associates, I wasn't aware of them. There were some women, of course. Quite a few of them, actually. But I never met any of them. I don't think he was interested in a real relationship. I think he was the kind of guy who didn't like to stick around in the morning, if you know what I mean.”

Mila knew what she meant, but she was having trouble believing it. Reid, the man in the wheelchair, didn't look like he could have been a womanizer for the simple reason that no woman in her right mind would have been interested in him. It wasn't that he was unattractive. He wasn't. Even his long hair—long enough to be falling in his eyes—and his scruffy beard couldn't hide the fact that he was a good-looking man. But his
personality
was so unattractive.
Yuck,
she thought. Who would have wanted to spend time with someone as boorish and as rude as he was?

But Allie, seeing the skepticism on Mila's face, only laughed. “No, it's true,” she said. “Woman liked him. He was good-looking. He
still
is good-looking, somewhere under all that facial hair. And as for the rest of him, well, he could be very charming when he wanted to be.”

Mila considered this. It seemed unlikely. In fact, the man in the coffee shop was so
un
charming that she was having difficulty imagining how she was going to spend the next three months with him. And Allie, watching her, sighed and shifted the baby to her other hip.

“Mila, I understand how you must be feeling about Reid right now. I really do. But you have to trust me when I say that there's a nice guy in there somewhere. In fact, I'll tell you something about Reid that'll prove it to you.”

Mila raised her eyebrows, curious in spite of herself.

“When my husband was growing up, Reid was the closest thing to a parent—a
good
parent—that he had. His actual parents had a terrible marriage—you know, one of those relationships that makes kids feel like they were living in a war zone—and then, when they finally got divorced, things got
worse
. They still fought all the time, only now they used the kids as weapons against each other. Finally, though, their dad just kind of washed his hands of all three of them, and their mom just kind of checked out. I mean, she was there, but she wasn't really
there
.”

Mila nodded. Her own mother had belonged to the same school of parenting, the there-but-not-there school. Except, of course, that in her case she really
hadn't
been there a lot of the time. When she had been there, though, it hadn't been much different.

“Anyway,” Allie continued, “that left Reid to be both parents to Walker, even though he was only a few years older than him. And you know what? He did it. He really did. He went to all his Little League games, and he helped him with his homework, and once, when Walker was having trouble with a class, he even went to a parent-teacher conference for him. Honestly, if it hadn't been for Reid, I don't know where Walker would have been. On his own, I guess.”

Mila knew something about that, too.

“So there you have it,” Allie said, shifting the baby back to the other hip. “That's how I know Reid can be a good guy. When he chooses to be one, of course. Which, admittedly, doesn't happen very often anymore. But, Mila?”

“Yes,” Mila said, relieved that the urge to cry had finally passed.

“Walker and I really need this to work out,” Allie said. “And I'm guessing you need it to work out, too.”

Mila looked at her sharply, wondering what Allie knew about her. But then she realized that Allie knew only what the agency had told her, which wasn't much. Only her professional qualifications. What she'd meant, probably, was that if Mila had had any other offers, she probably would have taken one closer to home.

Mila studied Allie then and decided that she liked her. She was pretty, with long, shiny, golden brown hair and bright hazel eyes. But more than that, she seemed nice. Genuine, open, and warm. Mila couldn't let her guard down around her, of course. She couldn't let her guard down around
anyone
. But when it came to working with Reid, she figured she could use an ally, and the sooner, the better.

“So what do you think?” Allie asked hopefully. “Are you willing to give it a try? Walker and I are only three miles and one phone call away. And I promise, both of us stop by at least once a day. Sometimes more. And anytime you need us to be there, we can be. Even if it's on short notice. I'll make sure Walker gives you both of our cell-phone numbers, okay?”

“Okay,” Mila said, trying, and failing, to smile. The thought of going home with Reid now, and of being left alone with him eventually, was filling her with an almost palpable dread. Still, it could be worse. It could be
a lot
worse. And, as she remembered how much worse it could be, her eyes traveled up and down the length of Butternut's Main Street, checking to see if she'd been followed. But . . . no. It was quiet. Just a rainy June afternoon in a small town.
A very pretty small town,
she thought. And it was true. Even on a gray day like today, Butternut's prettiness shone through. All the businesses on Main Street, for instance, had cheerful striped awnings, flower boxes, and brightly painted wooden benches for people to sit on. Taking this all in, Mila was reminded of the illustrations of small towns in children's books
she used to stare at longingly as a child. She'd lived in the city then, of course, but not the nice part of the city. She'd lived in a drab, hardscrabble part of it, where no one thought to plant flower boxes or worried that tired people might not have a bench to sit on.

Mila turned her eyes back to Allie and Brooke just in time to see Brooke yawn a miniature yawn and bury her face against Allie's shoulder.

“Listen, I need to get going,” Allie said apologetically. “I've got to pick up my son, Wyatt, at day camp, and I'm hoping it's not too late for Brooke to take a nap in her car seat. But Walker and I are going to switch cars, and he's going to drive you and Reid out to the cabin in the wheelchair-accessible van, all right? And, Mila?” she added, with a gentle smile. “Thank you. Thank you for coming. And thank you for staying.”

“You're welcome,” Mila said, with her best imitation of a smile, but standing there, under the dripping canopy, and feeling as gray as the rain itself, she thought,
Lucky for you I have nowhere else to go.

A
fterward, as they drove out to the cabin in the van, Mila was relieved to discover that Reid, who had earlier seemed so eager to provoke her, had now apparently lost interest in her and instead had settled into a gloomy silence in the back of the van. Walker ignored him and peppered Mila with friendly, innocuous questions. Outwardly, she listened to him, and provided him with what she hoped were appropriate answers, but inwardly, she paid attention to the route he was driving, memorizing it, in reverse, in case she ever needed to leave the cabin in a hurry.

Left at the Moccasin Bar,
she told herself, after they'd left the town and turned at a roadhouse whose neon sign blinked on and off even in broad daylight.
Right at Butternut Bait and Tackle. And left again at a sign for a resort called White Pines.
But when they reached the road the cabin was on—Butternut Lake Drive—Walker said to her, as if reading her mind, “Once you get to this road, it's hard to get lost. It's the only way in to the cabin and the only way out, too.”

Mila nodded, but his choice of words sounded ominous to her,
and she shivered, unconsciously, and drew her arms protectively around herself.

“Are you cold?” Walker asked. “I can roll up the windows.”

But Mila shook her head. “No, it's nice,” she said, gesturing to her half-open window. And it was. The air smelled clean and piney, and though it had stopped raining, when she turned her face to the window, it was bathed in a misty coolness.

They continued to drive in silence then, down a road that curved through dense forest as it followed the rough contours of a lake that only occasionally came into view on the left side of the van. Every once in a while, they'd pass a driveway, too, or a turnout for a logging road, but, for the most part, they passed nothing but unbroken stretches of pine and birch trees.

“Here's where the road starts to get twisty,” Walker said, as he took the van into a steep curve. “It's like this for the next five miles. All the rest of the way to the cabin, in fact. You don't get motion sickness, do you?” he asked, glancing at her sideways.

Mila shook her head, but as she did so they went into another turn and she braced her hand against the dashboard.

“That's good,” Walker said. “Because this road is hell otherwise. Wyatt, our son, is fine on it. But Allie and I joke that if Brooke turns out to be one of those kids who gets carsick, we're going to have to move into town.” He smiled, but then he turned serious. “Just be careful driving on this,” he said, lowering his voice. “Even in good weather, people have been known to take a turn too wide. And then there's the oncoming traffic. It's easy to inch into the other lane without realizing it. The next thing you know, you come into a turn and there's a pickup bearing down on you.”

“I'll be careful on it,” Mila assured him. Privately, though, she felt another wave of uneasiness.

But ten minutes later, after they'd turned into the long driveway, and the cabin had finally come into view, Mila's spirits lifted a little. The cabin, for one thing, was a cabin in name only, because while the word had called up for her an image of something that was at best rustic, and at worst, primitive, this place was neither of those things. It was large, and sleek, and modern, and yet, oddly enough, it was also completely at home here in the woods. Almost as if, instead of being built here, it had simply grown here, right along with the aspen and birch and pine trees that surrounded it.

Then, as soon as they pulled up in front, a woman came out of the house, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Hi, I'm Lonnie,” she said to Mila, as Mila climbed out of the van. She was a full-figured, blond-haired woman in late middle age with a wide, pleasant face and a friendly smile.

“I see you survived the drive,” she said to Mila, and then without waiting for an answer she frowned and added, perplexed, “But you're so young.”

“I'm not as young as I look,” Mila said quickly, feeling again as if some kind of apology was in order.

But Lonnie only smiled. “Nothing wrong with being young,” she said. “As anyone on my side of fifty will tell you. I just expected you to be more like the other two.” She lowered her voice as she glanced over at Walker, who was operating the van's wheelchair lift. “You know, the other two aides were both sort of . . . matronly, like me,” she explained.

Mila started to tell her she wasn't matronly, but Lonnie, at Walker's instructions, got Mila's suitcase out of the van and hurried her down the flagstone path to the cabin.

“Should I . . . should I help Walker with Reid?” Mila asked, looking over her shoulder.

“No, Walker's got everything under control,” Lonnie said genially. “They'll use the kitchen door. It has a wheelchair ramp. Besides, I'm under strict instructions from Walker to take you on a tour of the cabin and then help you get settled in your room.” She gestured for Mila to follow her into the cabin's main entrance. “We'll leave your suitcase here, for now,” she added, setting it down inside the front hallway, and leading Mila into what was obviously the cabin's living room.

“
It's so big,
” Mila murmured, amazed at the scale of the room. She'd lived her whole life in a series of rental apartments, each one seemingly smaller than the one before it, and she was not used to spaces this large.

“Oh, it's big all right,” Lonnie agreed, surveying the room as if for the first time.

But it wasn't
just
big. It was beautiful, too. Or maybe handsome was a better word, since there was something unmistakably masculine about it. It had a cathedral ceiling with exposed wooden beams, an enormous fieldstone fireplace that took up most of one wall, and another wall, at the foot of the room, constructed entirely of glass. Deep leather couches with soft sheepskin throws, richly patterned rugs, copper light fixtures, and lamps with oilskin shades completed a look that managed to be both rustic and warm at the same time.

“The fire's nice, too,” Lonnie said, gesturing to the huge, crackling fire in the fireplace. “Especially on a day like today when there's a bit of a chill in the air,” she added, and Mila wondered how much of that chill had come from the weather and how much of it had come from the occupant of this cabin.

“The deck's out here,” Lonnie said then, traversing the length of the room to the glass wall, whose sliding door opened onto a wooden deck that seemed almost as large as the living room
itself. Mila followed her and stood beside her as she looked out at the deck. She realized then that the cabin was built on a bluff above the lake, and that the deck was suspended in midair, with pine trees hovering above it and the water poised some distance below it.

“It's quite something, isn't it?” Lonnie chuckled, glancing at Mila. “Allie says that what Walker really wanted when he built this cabin was an adult tree house.”

An adult tree house,
Mila thought. That was exactly what it was like.

“There are the steps that go down to the lake,” Lonnie said, pointing to a set of steps on the deck's left-hand side. “I'm sure you'll want to spend as much time down there this summer as possible. Especially if you need to cool off in the lake. Walker doesn't like air-conditioning and he didn't install it.”

But Mila shrugged noncommittally. Why was everyone acting as if she was here on vacation? She didn't have time to think about that though once Lonnie resumed the tour. The living room made up the bulk of the cabin's downstairs, but there was also a study, a den, and a kitchen, each of which managed to seem both modern and warm at the same time—lots of clean lines, pale wood, and floor-to-ceiling windows. There was also a second floor, but Lonnie didn't take Mila up there. It was where Walker and Allie's and their children's bedrooms were, and, as Lonnie explained to Mila, they'd packed up and moved, for the time being, to Allie's family's old fishing cabin, the same one Allie had promised Mila was just three miles away.

“Now,” Lonnie said, after she'd picked up Mila's suitcase in the front hall and brought her down a hallway tucked in behind the kitchen, “these are the guest rooms. Reid is staying in this one”—she indicated a closed door behind which Allie could hear
Reid and Walker talking in low voices—“and this is the one you'll be staying in.” She pointed to a door at the end of the hall, only fifteen feet away from Reid's room.

“They're so close,” Mila said, without thinking. “Our bedrooms, I mean.”

“Well, that's a good thing, isn't it?” Lonnie said. She added quickly, “I mean, if he needs your help, you'll be able to hear him.” And Mila looked at her questioningly, wondering if she was referring to the nightmares Walker had told her about. But Lonnie was already opening the door to Mila's room, and, bustling inside it, she put Mila's suitcase on the luggage rack and started raising shades and turning on lights.

It was a nice room, Mila saw. Simple, yet somehow luxurious in its simplicity. It had only a bed, a bedside table, a dresser, a desk, and an armchair, but Mila thought it was more than adequate to her needs, especially since the muted color pallet and creamy bed linens gave it a restful quality she could appreciate in her present weariness.

“The bathroom's down the hall,” Lonnie said, pausing to fluff up one of Mila's pillows with a proprietary air. “And there are extra towels and bed linens in the closet. Now, I'll leave you to get unpacked,” she continued. “After that, why don't you come find me in the kitchen? I'll be leaving soon, at four o'clock, and before I go I want to show you a few more things. Nothing too complicated. The fuse box, the thermostat, the alarm.”

“The alarm?” Mila repeated.

“Yes,” Lonnie said, misreading her interest. “But it's perfectly safe out here. You don't even need to use it if you don't want to. Walker had it put in because one of the previous home health aides insisted on it. I guess she was spooked by being out in the woods like this.”

“Well, you might as well show me how it works,” Mila said casually, though she already knew she would set the alarm every night.

Lonnie left then, and Mila closed the door, walked over to the luggage rack, and opened up her suitcase. The first thing she unpacked from it were her test prep books for the nursing school entrance exam. There were several of them, and they'd taken up precious space in her small suitcase, but it had never occurred to her not to pack them. Now she placed them, along with lined paper, pencils, and a pencil sharpener, into the top drawer of the desk. After that, she put the few clothes she'd brought into the dresser drawers and arranged a small selection of toiletries on top of the dresser. Last, she took the ring box out from the bottom of her suitcase, and, without opening it, she placed it in the very back of the bottom dresser drawer, where it would be out of her sight.

As she closed the drawer and stood up, she caught sight of herself in the mirror hanging above the dresser, and, resisting the urge to look away, she studied herself in its reflection. First, she looked at herself head-on, then she tilted her chin, slowly, up and down, and turned her face to the right and then the left. She'd done a good job with her makeup, she decided, and it hadn't completely worn off on the bus, either. She could still see, of course, the faint shadow above and below her left eye, and the slight swelling of her upper left lip. But she didn't think either of these was visible to the untrained eye.

But the makeup couldn't hide everything, she reminded herself, reaching down and pulling up her blouse's left sleeve. Just a few inches above her wrist, the bruises started. A whole line of them, running up the inside of her arm to her elbow. They had faded from their original purple to a dull, ugly yellow, but
it would be another week, at least, until they completely disappeared. She'd have to be careful to keep them under wraps until then, she decided, letting her sleeve fall back into place.

She knew she should go and find Lonnie in the kitchen now, but instead she wandered, a little forlornly, over to one of the room's windows and looked out of it, onto a seemingly endless expanse of forest. The recent rain had left it looking lush and verdant, and the grass and the ferns and the trees together made up a thousand shades of green, from the palest moss green to the deepest pine green, each one layered intricately over the other and stretching away as far as the eye could see. And looking into that distance now, Mila was struck suddenly by how isolated she was here. And that was a good thing, she told herself, because what were the chances of him finding her all the way out here? Then again, if he
did
find her, late one night, it would be just her and Reid here. She pictured Reid in his wheelchair, pictured his hostility at the coffee shop, his glumness in the van. He wouldn't help her, she thought. No, she corrected herself, he
couldn't
help her. Even if he was inclined to help her—and he clearly was not—his physical condition wouldn't allow him to. If Brandon ever found her here, she decided, she would be really, and truly, on her own.

L
ater that evening, after Walker and Lonnie had left for the night, but before Mila took Reid his dinner, she sat on the edge of her bed, giving herself a silent pep talk.
You can do this, Mila. You know you can. Just remember, it's not about you. It's about doing the right thing. It's about honoring the contract you signed. The one that said you'd be responsible for Reid's well-being.
Not his
emotional
well-being, of course. Because that would be a tall order. That would require knowledge and
skill well beyond her home health aide certification. But for his
physical
well-being.
And that means you need to be responsible for giving Reid his pain medication. Because right now, nobody knows how often he's taking it. Or how much of it he's taking. Or in what combinations he's taking it.
And if he were to have an accidental overdose, or, God forbid, a purposeful overdose—because, based on what Walker had told her about him, the man was obviously depressed—then it would be her fault.
And you don't want that on your conscience, do you?