The Father Factor

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It was one of the few moments in his life that had had the power to convince him, over the past six years, that he had any sense of honor in him at all.

Chapter Four

“H ere’s another thing that doesn’t make sense,” Sunny Duncan said to her daughter.

“Show me, Mom.” Shallis hid a yawn behind her hand as she spoke.

Last night’s function at the Grand Regency had run until after midnight, and she hadn’t gotten enough sleep. To be honest, though, her serial yawns weren’t happening just because her job had kept her up late.

Instead, blame Jared.

No, blame herself for the fact that he’d stuck around in her head all night, along with memories of those tingles running up her legs when he’d worked on her knee. She was shocked at how powerful the memories were. Fingers were just fingers. A knee was just a knee. This shouldn’t happen.

With a quiet day at the hotel today, she’d taken the morning off work, but she’d known her mother was going over to Gram’s to sort through more of her things so she’d set her alarm for seven anyhow, and they’d both arrived at Gram’s house at eight.

Now it was just after ten, and the two of them had worked for two hours without a break. Even with the windows open, the place felt dusty and musty because of the things they’d unearthed, and Shallis craved coffee and some kind of carbloaded, totally unacceptable snack.

“It’s a bill for roof shingles,” her mother said, holding out a creased invoice. “From a slate company.”

“Fifty-six Chestnut has a slate roof,” Shallis said.

She shivered suddenly. What was that old saying? Someone is walking over my grave.

“So you’ve been past the house?”

“Yesterday evening. I didn’t tell you—” And I know why I didn’t tell you. Because I ran into Jared there, and I had his fingers on my knee all night. “—but I got out of the car to take a look at the place, and saw that the roof had been repaired with new slate. I actually thought—”

She stopped, because it sounded too strange, and her mother finished the sentence for her, looking a little spooked, also.

“—that your grandmother would choose slate if it was her place, even though it costs a bundle. I know. Of course she would.”

“But it can’t be her place.”

“Exactly. This is her place. My Lord, I grew up here, and I visited her here practically every day. I love this house, but good gosh, Shallie, it’s nowhere near as big and nice as the places on Chestnut Street. It doesn’t make sense that she’d own a house there that she never told us about, and never lived in, and never sold.”

“It doesn’t, does it?” Shallis frowned.

“Was anyone home?”

“I think it’s unoccupied. Although from what I could see it hadn’t been that way for long. Since February, maybe.”

“We need to take this invoice over to Mr. Starke’s office right away.” Sunny caught sight of her daughter’s expression. “Yes, and talk to his grandson. You managed it yesterday without hitting the man. I can probably do the same.”

There was the definite suggestion that this would be an act of heroic restraint on Sunny’s part.

Shallis hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Have you talked to Linnie since the weekend?”

Sunny sighed. “Oh, trust me, honey, I know her cycle as well as she does. I called her last night and I could tell just by the sound of her voice that she’s not pregnant again this month.”

“Nobody told me how bad it’s been hitting her.”

“Did you really need to hear it, out in L.A., with so much else to think about?”

“Yes, I did! I didn’t need to be shut out. She’s my sister. How can you stay close if you don’t know what’s going on? And nobody considered that. Not Ryan or you or dad. Nobody told me it was threatening her marriage.”

“Threatening her marriage? No!” Mom looked shocked. “Her and Ryan? No! It’s not doing that.”

“She seemed pretty upset about it last night, Mom. She stopped trying to pretend with me—the way you’ve all been pretending to me for months!”

“What? The same way you didn’t admit to us how miserable you’d gotten in L.A?”

Two points to Mom, to level the score.

“Okay… The thing is,” Shallis said, “is whether Linnie’s going to get even more upset about what’s happening with her and Ryan if she has to deal with Jared being back in town as well. She says she’s not.”

“But you don’t think we should believe her.”

“I’m not sure that we should risk having her find out the hard way that she was wrong,” Shallis said slowly. “And I want to know how you feel, yourself, about Jared being involved in dealing with Gram’s estate. We could go to another lawyer. He offered me that option himself, and I said I’d discuss it with you. If you want to bail out, now’s the time. If you think there’s any risk to Linnie at all…”

“I never trusted Jared when he and Linnie were going out. I wasn’t sorry when he dumped her, in my heart of hearts, even though she felt for a long time as if he’d broken hers.”

“Why didn’t you trust him, Mom?”

“Because he’s the type who does break hearts.”

“So it’s a lifelong habit?”

Did she really need to know Mom’s opinion?

“A habit or a hobby. It can be, honey, in my experience, unless a man is given a good reason to change. But I don’t think he could break Linnie’s heart anymore. She has her priorities in place, even if they’re painful ones right now. Let’s take this invoice over to Jared, and keep it businesslike.”

Another Duncan family member who didn’t seem to understand that Shallis wanted an easy way out, the way they’d never realized how miserable she was in L.A. while she was attempting to build a career in PR. Apparently thanks to her pageant years, she was simply too good an actress.

“How about we call first?” she suggested. “In case he’s—”

Left the country. Wouldn’t that be nice?

“—on another appointment.” Mom nodded. “Yes, let’s do that.”

She was already reaching for her neat little cell phone. She spoke to Andrea, then waited while the receptionist put her through to Jared’s office. And then…

Uh-oh.

The Voice.

The one that could probably shatter a champagne glass at twenty paces.

The one that said, loud and clear, I don’t like or trust you but you’ll never be able to pin me down on that in a hundred years because I’m wa-a-ay too well mannered and well raised.

Shallis was all too familiar with The Voice. It was high and cooing and polite, dripping with honey yet still somehow sharp as a razor and cold as Arctic ice. She’d heard it many times during her pageant years, when Mom spoke to another pageant mother whose daughter was, say, bitching about the other girls behind their backs, or wearing a gown that Mom considered inappropriate for her age. “Your daughter could pass for twenty instead of twelve in that outfit, couldn’t she, bless her heart!”

Shallis only focused on her mother’s tone, at first, but then the tone changed—got warmer by about five degrees, kept the honey but lost some of the razorlike edge—and she started to listen more carefully.

“Oh, you have?” Mom was saying. “And you want us to come in? Right away? Yes, because we’re very anxious to hear. We’ll be right down.”

She flipped the phone shut a few seconds later and looked at her daughter with raised brows.

“He’s found out something,” Shallis said.

“And he doesn’t want to discuss it over the phone. Doctors are like that, too.” Mom sounded edgy. “They want to see that you’re sitting down. What in the blue blazes could Gram have had going on in her life that we would need to hear about sitting down?”

Mom was already on her way to the bathroom with her lipstick in her hand. She tended to wear makeup the way medieval knights wore suits of armor. Shallis felt an instinctive urge to follow her and do some facial repair work of her own, but she resisted and simply retrieved her lip balm from her purse instead.

“You’re not going to change and do your face?” her mother asked. She looked shocked.

Shallis looked down at her jeans and top, and brushed away a few token specks of dust. “Nope,” she answered.

Put on full cosmetic battle dress for Jared Starke?

She wouldn’t stoop to such desperate measures.

Mysteries weren’t supposed to be this easy to solve. As soon as he’d gotten home from his exploratory visit to Fifty-six Chestnut Street last night, Jared had called his grandfather and found his cell phone switched on at last.

“Darn it, I meant to tell you about that place before I left. Too much else on my mind.”

“Like trout fishing flies, I’m guessing,” Jared drawled. He understood his grandfather pretty well. “So you know about it?”

“Of course I know about it. Find something in this town that I don’t know about and you can sell me the Empire State Building while you’re at it.” He clicked his tongue. “I wanted Caroline McLenaghan to do something about the place, but she didn’t feel ready, and then she had her stroke. I was her lawyer for fifty years. More to the point, I was Flip Templeton’s lawyer, too.”

Jared sighed. “Tell me the whole story, Grandpa Abe. I have a feeling none of this is going to make any sense until you do. Beginning, middle and end, please, in that order, and don’t make any assumptions about what I already know.”

So now Jared knew, and Sunny and Shallis Duncan were on their way to his office at this very moment to find out. He’d spent half the morning wondering when and how to give them the story. Mrs. Duncan’s phone call a few minutes ago had made the decision for him.

He didn’t know how they would take it. It wasn’t so much the fact that Caroline McLenaghan had secretly owned a very substantial Victorian dwelling for the past thirty years and more, it was the reason why she’d owned it that might knock the whole Duncan family for a loop.

This was what small town legal work was all about, he’d begun to discover, after just a day and a half on the job. Friends and enemies, rumors and facts, individuals and families, secrets that echoed down the generations.

Jared hadn’t known it would be so interesting…or such a responsibility. By his own admission, Grandpa Abe would have more stories locked away in file drawers and safes and his own memory than anybody but old Dr. Taylor, who’d finally retired at eight-five, just last year. As manager of the Douglas County Bank, Bob Duncan must know a good few town secrets, also, but his mother-in-law Caroline McLenaghan had always banked with Tennessee State and Main, so Bob hadn’t known this one.