I told myself not to forget it.
It wasn’t easy considering Jack was gorgeous in a gray suit, a white shirt, and a gray tie streaked with blue that wasn’t quite as intense as the color of his eyes. He was generous, too; he ordered the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu and insisted I get the twelve-ounce center-cut filet although I told him there was no way I could even eat all of the eight-ounce. He said I’d appreciate having the leftovers for dinner the next day. Fishy or not, I think he must have known something about the salary of a cemetery tour guide.
Oh yeah, Jack was every bit as delicious as our meal, and as charming as hell, too.
But I am strong, remember, not to mention determined. We exchanged small talk over dinner, but when our waitress brought coffee and a vanilla bean crème brûlée for us to share, I knew it was time. I had cut Jack enough slack.
“So how are things at school?” I asked him.
He was as smooth as the crème brûlée. “We don’t start until next week. Which is why I decided to stay in Cleveland another couple days. There’s so much to see here. Man, I can’t believe the whole summer has flown by. Vacation always goes too fast.”
“And you must be knee-deep in getting ready for the new school year, what with lesson plans and all. I get so mixed up sometimes!” I made sure I rolled my eyes when I said this, the way I’d seen the truly dim girls do. “I remember you said you were from Hammond, Indiana, but where did you say you teach? Laramie High School?”
“Lafayette High School.”
I smiled like I was too dumb to keep track.
Like
being the operative word. “And you teach math, right?”
“History.”
I hate a liar who can keep his story straight.
I spooned up some crème brûlée. “A history teacher probably knows a lot about . . . well, history! I mean, presidential history.”
“Exactly.” Jack took two bites of dessert to my one, and I saw that if I didn’t get a move on, he was going to get more than his share. The crème brûlée was that good. “That’s how I developed my interest in President Garfield.”
“So a history teacher would know about his life.”
“Sure.” He took another bite of dessert, but his eyes were on me. I do not have an overactive imagination, but I swear, there was a flash of irritation in those incredibly blue eyes of his. I knew what it meant. No matter how innocent my questions, by asking them I was challenging him.
And Jack didn’t like to be challenged.
He kept his eyes on mine. A not-so-subtle signal that no matter how innocent or clever I was, he wasn’t going to cave. He sat forward and propped his elbows on the table. “Would you like to know what year he was born? It was 1831. Or when he accepted a teaching position at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute? That was 1856. Just a year later, he was named president of the school. It’s called Hiram College now, you know.”
“No, no. Nothing like that. That’s not what I meant.” I didn’t know enough yet; I couldn’t afford to alienate Jack. I kept my tone as light as can be. “What I was really wondering about is any family secrets he might have had.”
It wasn’t my imagination the first time and it wasn’t this time, either. That little spark in Jack’s eyes tamped back. I hadn’t even realized his shoulders were stiff until I saw him relax. He put down his spoon and sat back. Which gave me unspoken permission to finish the dessert. While I did that, I watched him watch me, and damn, but I wished I could read the thoughts going through his head. Did he know I was on to him and his lies about Lafayette High School? Maybe. But there was one thing for sure—he was a cool customer. Too cool to show it.
“You’re talking about his affair with Lucia Calhoun,” Jack said. He drank his coffee hot and black, just like Quinn did. I sipped. He gulped it down. “That’s no secret. Garfield admitted the indiscretion to his wife. She forgave him.”
“And there were no children.”
“Not as far as anyone knows.” Jack sat up. “Wait a minute! Are you telling me you think there were? That there’s some kind of proof?” Since I was being coy in the name of detecting, it was just as well that I had a mouth full of crème brûlée and couldn’t say a thing. He went right on. “If you did have some kind of proof . . . wow . . . that would create quite a sensation.” He smiled at the prospect, but little by little, that smile faded. By the time it was completely gone, there was nothing but worry in Jack’s eyes.
A guy who cares enough about me to worry.
It’s one of those things that always gets to me. Especially true when Jack reached across the table and covered my hand with his and little sizzles of electricity danced across my skin.
I reminded myself about my “no murderers” rule.
“You told me once that the woman who was murdered at the memorial . . . you said something about how she thought she was related to the Garfields. Now you’re asking about something personal that belonged to the Garfield family. Does this have something to do with the murder, Pepper? Because if it does . . .”
Chalk it up to flashbacks. This sounded a little too much like the horse hockey I’d heard from Quinn, and I knew what was coming next. Jack was going to say exactly what Quinn would have said in this situation: mind your own business.
I pulled my hand out from under his and tucked it in my lap, the better to keep the electricity down to a minimum and keep myself from getting burned.
Maybe I didn’t have to because the next second, Jack asked, “Are you looking into the murder? Investigating? Wow! I’m impressed. But I’m worried, too. That sounds dangerous. And I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”
“I’m not exactly investigating,” I told him because, since what I was doing, exactly, was investigating, the last thing I wanted was to admit it. “I’ve just heard some things and talked to some people and it all got me wondering.”
The waitress came over to refill our coffee and leave a leather portfolio with the bill in it, and I waited for her to pour, then added sweetener to my coffee. “I guess I just don’t understand why people care about old things and history that doesn’t matter anymore. I thought maybe you could explain it to me.”
Jack chuckled. He didn’t even look at the bill; he just took out a credit card and popped it in the portfolio. That was when his cell rang.
He looked at the caller ID and pushed back his chair. “I’m sorry. Really. But I’ve got to take this.”
I gave him a little wave to tell him it was fine by me. Since he already had the phone up to his ear, there didn’t seem to be much point in saying anything else. Already deep in his conversation, he walked out toward the lobby and I saw him march out the front door to the street and the place where the poor smokers had to go to indulge their nasty habit.
I sipped my coffee.
And eyed that leather portfolio.
Call me nosey. But then, it is my business, isn’t it?
I checked to make sure Jack was still outside and flipped open the portfolio. He’d put a MasterCard inside that looked just like the MasterCard in the bottom drawer of my dresser, the one with Bernard O’Banyon’s name on it.
Again, I glanced up. Jack was nowhere in sight and I didn’t know how much time I had.
I grabbed the card for a closer look and tipped it to the light so I could see the name embossed on it.
Ryan Kubilik.
I committed the name to memory, but even as I did, I had a feeling I knew what I’d find when I did an Internet search for this Ryan guy.
He’d be dead, just like Bernard O’Banyon.
And I knew what that meant: though I couldn’t imagine how or why, there was a connection between Jack and Marjorie. One that involved phony credit cards. And may have resulted in murder.
The thought soured the taste of the crème brûlée in my mouth. Lucky for me, I didn’t let it stall me. I tucked the card back into the portfolio and slipped the portfolio back in place next to Jack’s coffee cup just as both he and the waitress showed up.
I don’t waste time on feeling guilty. But I’m not stupid, either. When Jack slid a look from me to the portfolio and back again, I knew enough to get a little nervous. I also knew not to let it show. In fact, I knew I’d been handed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, if not on a silver platter, than at least in a leather portfolio.
Have I mentioned that I looked stunning that night in a little black dress cut up to here and down to there? It was what I’d worn to my former fiancé’s most recent engagement party, and I’d pulled it out especially for tonight’s dinner to remind myself I was nobody’s fool. Not even a teacher from a school that didn’t exist.
I leaned forward, and this time, I was the one who made the move. Jack’s left hand was on the table and I skimmed a finger lightly over it.
His eyes lit up. “I see you don’t want to talk about President Garfield anymore.”
I sparkled just enough to look cute without looking too anxious. “All that old stuff, it’s all such a silly waste of time,” I said, waving away the subject as inconsequential because, let’s face it, I now had bigger fish to fry. “But I have been thinking about something we talked about back at the memorial once. You said you hoped Marjorie didn’t spend her life scrimping and saving and never buying all the wonderful things she wanted because, in the end, the bills didn’t matter as much as how she enjoyed her life.”
I felt a thrill shiver over Jack’s skin. I skipped my finger up his hand to his wrist and back down again. The smile he sent my way was hotter than the candlelight that flickered on the table between us.
“I was hoping . . .” I didn’t do bashful well, but heck, I’d been dating for years, I could blush with the best of them, and I pulled out all the stops. “Marjorie was never one of my favorite people, but I’ve been thinking . . . and hoping . . . that someday, I could be like her.” Even though I was lying through my teeth, I felt obligated to qualify the statement. Not that anyone near us heard or cared, but I couldn’t stand the thought that someone might think I was referring to Marjorie’s fashion sense, her awful perfume, or those nasty little head scarves of hers.
“Well, when it comes to her spending habits, anyway,” I added, just to make things crystal clear. “She didn’t let anything stand in the way of getting what she wanted. Somehow, even though she was just a retired librarian living on a fixed income, she managed to build her Garfield collection. I’d like to know how she did that. And I’d like to be able to do it, too. You know, buy the things I want. The things that would make me happy.”
If I suspected it was my imagination that caused that spark to flare in Jack’s eyes again, I was proved wrong when he moved like greased lightning and snatched my hand in his. His grip was a little too intimate to be just friendly. And too crushing to be taken as anything but a warning.
His smile, though, was as sweet as the crème brûlée, which had turned to a rock inside my stomach. “You’re a great kid,” he said, his voice as honeyed as the look in his eyes. “You’re beautiful. You’re sexy. You’re smart. But a little advice here from someone a little bit older and wiser: don’t be too smart for your own good.”
The waitress showed up and Jack quickly dropped my hand. He scrawled a name across the bottom of the charge receipt and added a whopping tip. But then, he could afford to. He wasn’t the one paying the bill.
I had added to my
never
list—
Never go to bed with a guy you don’t trust.
Never go to bed with a guy who might be a murderer.
And never even think about having sex with a guy who uses a phony credit card to pay for dinner.
Disappointing, sure, but the evening wasn’t a total bust. I’d learned something else about Jack: he was up to no good, all right, but something told me it wasn’t the no good I thought he was up to.
I smiled when he pulled out my chair. I chatted and laughed when he walked me back to my car and we talked about how he’d come from Hammond, Indiana, some weekend soon so we could see each other again.
When we got to the Mustang, I stopped dead and the bag with my leftover filet in it slipped from my hands and splatted on the pavement.
The light of a nearby streetlamp glared against the message scrawled on my windshield in garish pink lipstick.
Pepper
, it said,
you have to love ME.
“Y
ou would be wise to exert an extreme amount of caution. As I have mentioned to you previously, the man who shot me—”
“Was a stalker. Yeah, yeah. I remember.” When I got to the memorial the next Monday, I made the mistake of mentioning the Saturday night incident with my car and the cheap lipstick to the president. Now, I waved away his words of warning, and it was no wonder why.
After finding that message on the windshield of my car, I covered for the terror that snaked through me by making up a story to convince Jack it was nothing but a silly joke. That was all well and good until we said our good-byes and my overactive imagination spent the rest of the weekend constructing one frightening scenario after another. Hey, a single woman spends a lot of evenings at home, and a lot of those evenings, I’d spend watching old movies. Oh yeah, I’d seen them all:
Play Misty for Me
,
Misery
, (gulp!)
Fatal Attraction
. . .
My stalker-induced hysteria ranged from kidnapping to murder—and everything in between. I was on edge. I was twitchy. I was so strung out from not sleeping I’d nearly forgotten to put on my mascara that morning.
Where had it all gotten me? Nowhere but Anxiety City, and I was more than ready for a break. “I’m being careful,” I told the president and reminded myself.
“I trust you are locking your doors?”
It was a silly question so I didn’t bother to answer. Besides, I was tired of being a marshmallow. With that in mind, I’d gotten to work early that morning and stopped at the administration building first thing. I was armed with a computer printout that listed the addresses and phone numbers of all the Ryan Kubiliks I could find. There were only three of them, but that was OK. That meant I had few phone calls to make.