Stranger in the Moonlight Read online

  Two minutes later she was calling the person she wanted to talk to about all this. He answered on the first ring and said he’d meet her right away. Twenty minutes later she was pulling into Joe Layton’s parking lot.

  Twelve

  Joe Layton’s solution to every problem was the same: food and work. After he’d spent thirty minutes listening to Kim’s nearly incoherent words that she uttered in between copious tears, and feeding her, he put her to work. As he had her help him put the supplies Travis had unpacked on the shelves that he’d installed, Joe couldn’t help musing on the fact that their turbulent love life was giving him a lot of free labor.

  “I don’t get it,” she said as she picked up boxes of electric drills and put them on the shelves. “Why would he make so much effort to get a man away from me if all he plans to do is leave me and go back to . . . to wherever he lives?”

  “New York,” Joe said. “Lives on the top floor of some big building.”

  “He told you that?”

  “No, but I found out.”

  “That means you’ve known Travis’s last name and you looked him up on the Internet,” Kim said with a sigh. “Reede said I’d find out everything there, but he couldn’t wait to send me info. But who wants to find out about someone on the Web? But then, why does everything Travis tells me have to be a lie? Or an evasion? What’s happened in his life that makes him think even the most ordinary things have to be kept secret?”

  “I don’t know,” Joe said. They were questions that were bothering him too. He’d given Lucy every opportunity to tell him about her son, but she hadn’t. Three times she’d almost said “my son” but each time she’d caught herself. Joe was trying hard not to get angry about it, but it wasn’t easy. “Are you in love with young Travis?” he blurted out.

  Kim paused for a moment in putting a box on the shelf. “How can I be? I thought I knew the boy Travis, but the adult . . . I don’t know who he is. He seems to think he has a right to oversee my life. He takes away from me but gives nothing in return.” She knew that wasn’t true, but her anger wasn’t allowing her to reason.

  The red light on Joe’s cell phone came on again. He had it on silent so Kim couldn’t hear it, but Joe knew that Travis had called him eight times since she’d arrived. He also knew he was going to have to deal with the young man or he’d show up at the door. And with the mood Kim was in now, she might throw an anvil at him.

  “Didn’t I hear that you were supposed to do something special this weekend?” Joe asked.

  Kim groaned. As angry as she was, it didn’t dampen her artist’s eye as she arranged the small machines on the shelves. She put them up with all the finesse that she used to display her jewelry. “Jocelyn—she’s married to my cousin—wants me to go to some little town in Maryland to see if I can find out about some great-great-grandaunt of mine. Joce is doing genealogy charts, and this woman in Maryland had a kid but there’s no father listed. This is back in 1890-something. I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this. But anyway, Dave wanted to go with me and we were going to make it a minivacation. He was going to . . .” She waved her hand. If she continued talking, she’d start crying again. “I think I’d better cancel my reservation.”

  She couldn’t help thinking about what might have been. What would she have done if Dave had asked her to marry him? She’d told Travis she’d known all about the man, but she hadn’t. Hearing that he’d pawned the ring he’d slick-talked Carla into “giving” him had made Kim feel sick. She’d not seen anything in Dave that made her think he was capable of such thievery. He’d always been so very nice—boring, but pleasant and likeable. His talks about her going national with her jewelry had always been presented in the most respectful way, saying that it was her decision, and he was only tossing out ideas. And she really had thought the name he’d suggested was just a crude joke.

  She’d only heard about Dave’s company’s failure the day before Jecca’s wedding, the day before Travis reappeared in her life. She’d seen that two of his vans were on their last legs, but he’d laughed and said he had too much work to do to order new ones. She’d had no reason to disbelieve him.

  But the day before the wedding, when everything was chaos and there were so many people around, Kim had overheard a woman saying she was glad Jecca hadn’t used that “dreadful” Borman Catering. Kim had tried to get him for the wedding, but he’d been booked solid. Kim had asked the woman why she didn’t like Borman Catering and she’d been told the story of the switched ingredients. And she’d heard that people were canceling their future orders with him. At the time, Kim had been so busy helping Jecca that she hadn’t thought about what that meant. When Kim looked back on it, she realized that she hadn’t wanted to see that Dave’s business was going under. And she didn’t want to think about that in connection to how often he asked for the combination to her safe.

  Was Dave yet another man in her life who couldn’t see past her success?

  Kim arranged a hand drill in its case as artistically as she could manage, then started putting up the boxes of bits.

  When Joe excused himself to make a call, Kim continued to work—and to think.

  Okay, so maybe it was true that she didn’t know as much about Dave as she’d told Travis she did, but did that give him the right to . . . to . . . take over?

  She thought of Travis buying Borman Catering. Why? But she knew the answer. He paid all that money just to send Dave away. On the drive to Joe’s she’d called a client who lived in Dave’s building and was told that he’d left with six suitcases and had told the landlord he wasn’t coming back.

  “The landlord was furious,” the woman said. “Dave left so much junk behind and the landlord has to take care of it. But then some man called and said he’d come get everything. The whole building is talking about it. What do you know?”

  “Nothing,” Kim said and politely hung up.

  She’d told Travis she hated the way he’d swooped in and taken over, but there was a part of her that was grateful that he’d saved her from Dave. Kim now wondered if she would have agreed to marry him. Had Jecca’s wedding, her happiness, made Kim so envious that she would have said yes just to . . . ? She didn’t want to think about what could have happened.

  Earlier, as Kim had pulled into Joe’s parking lot, her cell buzzed. It was an e-mail from her brother and there was an attachment. Kim hesitated before opening it because she knew what it was going to be. But she also knew she needed to see the truth. She pushed the button and the first thing she saw was a photo of some drop-dead gorgeous woman named Leslie. The caption read WEDDING BELLS FOR A MAXWELL? The article told how the beautiful model had been going steady with the megarich son of Randall Maxwell for months now. “Travis—über rich, über beautiful—never dates anyone for longer than six weeks. But he and the luscious Leslie have been together for nearly a year now. Can we look forward to a wedding like the world has never before seen?”

  Kim couldn’t stand to read the rest of the documents her brother had sent. That one was quite enough.

  When she got out of the car, Joe was standing in the doorway, and he opened his arms to her. If her dad had been home she would have gone to him, but Jecca’s father was nearly as good.

  She’d cried hard for a while, then Joe had ordered in pizza and huge colas and enough cinnamon sticks to fatten half of Edilean. Kim had cried and eaten, then cried some more.

  “I don’t understand why he lied to me,” she said.

  “Borman or young Travis?” Joe asked.

  “Travis,” Kim said. “Dave is . . . He’s a real person, so of course he lies.”

  Joe raised his eyebrows but he didn’t comment on that statement. In dealing with his children of opposite sexes he’d learned a hard fact. If Joey came to him with a problem, he was asking for help to find a solution. But if Jecca had a problem, she just wanted Joe to listen. No advice. Whereas Joe had been free in telling Travis what he thought, Joe didn’t dare offer Kim so much as a suggestion.