Wild Orchids Read online

  “I think he probably knows a lot more about this than he’s told me. It changed his life—just as it did mine. I really think that…that…”

  “Your mother was one of the people who put rocks on…Amarisa?” The name sounded strange, but it fit her. Part of me wanted to show Jackie the photo of the woman’s reconstructed face, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. First of all, I was sure that Jackie would see the resemblance to herself. And I was just as sure that she’d remember the woman. She remembered everything else in town, so why not her own relative? I’d heard that we never forget traumatic events in our lives, so I doubted if Jackie could look at that photo and not recall what she’d seen.

  But I couldn’t get past my hurt. I’d been honest with Jackie since the day I met her. I’d told her everything about my life. Well, okay, actually, I’d written my life story, sold it, and made a lot of money off it, but still, Jackie knew all about me. Maybe it was true that I’d not told her much about my dinner with Dessie, but then I’d not found out anything that I could share with Jackie. Except about the sculptures in Dessie’s locked cupboard. And the fact that I thought one of the women in the sculpture was Jackie’s mother. But still, I wasn’t hiding anything as big as what Jackie was keeping from me. Except maybe the photo in the FedEx envelope.

  “Jackie,” I said softly, “if you had another vision, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you? Me. Not someone you hardly know.”

  When she looked at me, she seemed to be trying to decide whether or not to answer me. And whether or not she should tell me first—or him.

  What had this man done to win her loyalty so completely? I wondered. She couldn’t have spent too much time with him because she’d been with me nearly every minute for the last few days. Yet she was contemplating telling him and not me about something that I’d come to think of as a secret between us.

  “Yeah, I’ll tell you,” she said after a while, and gave me a small smile. “But what do I do if—”

  “You see evil inside a person’s head?” I had no idea. That was a question that would take a philosopher a lifetime to answer. I wanted to lighten the mood between us. “Look into my eyes and tell me what I’m thinking about Russell Dunne,” I said, leaning across the desk and staring at her hard.

  “That you want him to move in here with us, along with your father and cousin,” she said instantly, without a hint of a smile.

  Groaning, I leaned back in my chair. “Very funny. You should have been a comedian.”

  “I have to be around this house. What are we going to do with your family?”

  “Why don’t we ask Russell?” I said.

  “Before or after we ask Dessie?”

  I clamped my mouth closed before I let it out of the bag that there was nothing between Dessie and me. Right now I wished I’d not been such a great guy and smoothed things out between Dessie and her young boyfriend. I should have grabbed Dessie in front of the windows and kissed her. At least now I’d have a girlfriend to balance out Jackie’s boyfriend.

  I forced myself not to ask Jackie if she could repair her last wedding dress, and instead said that my father and Noble absolutely, positively could not, under any circumstances in the world, live in this house with me. As I hoped it would, that set Jackie off and took her mind off Russell Dunne. I got to practice my sleeping-while-sitting-up-with-my-eyes-wide-open again, and was on the verge of mastering it, when a delightful smell wafted up through the old floorboards. “What’s that?” I asked and knew by Jackie’s sly look that she was up to something.

  “Did you know that your cousin can bake?”

  I just blinked at that. It was certainly my day for shocks. If Jackie had said that Noble was secretly Spiderman I couldn’t have been more surprised.

  “It smells like he’s taken something out of the oven. Shall we go down and sample the wares?”

  I wanted to be aloof. I wanted to tell Jackie that I had work to do and couldn’t be bothered with something as lowly as doughnuts. Or cinnamon rolls. Or whatever was making that divine smell.

  But I followed her like a dog on a leash all the way down to the kitchen. The table in the middle of the room was loaded with baked goods, and from the sheer quantity of it all, it wasn’t difficult to figure out where Noble got his training. I was sure he was used to cooking for many men at a time, maybe a whole jail full of them.

  Toodles and Tessa were already seated at the table, both of them with big glasses of milk and wearing white mustaches. Once again, my jealousy flared. First some stranger takes away the loyalty of my assistant, and now my own father was taking away my sidekick.

  As Noble dumped a bunch of fat, and extremely sticky, cinnamon buns onto a plate about four inches below my nose, he punched my shoulder and said, “It looks like it’s just you and me.”

  The real trouble with relatives is that they know you too well. If you’ve grown up with them, they knew you when you were too young to have developed disguises. Maybe I could hide my feelings from Jackie, who hadn’t known me very long, but I couldn’t hide anything from Noble. He knew that I was jealous as I watched my former buddy, Tessa, practically sitting on my father’s lap.

  Once I’d eaten one or two of Noble’s baked goods—certainly not enough to warrant Jackie’s remarks about Henry the Eighth being alive and well—I decided to keep my mouth shut and think about things for a while. I needed to see what was going on around me and make some decisions. And, no, I wasn’t “sulking” as Jackie said I was.

  I got a book, stretched out in the hammock in the garden, and watched the lot of them as they interacted. Okay, so what I really wanted was a reason to send my father to an old-age home, and to tell Noble that he definitely had to make his own way in life. I’d willingly given Noble’s kids a start in life, but I didn’t owe anything to my cousin.

  But, oh, hell, why did it all have to be so damned pleasant?

  It seemed that my father had a thousand ways to sit in one place and occupy himself. I watched with fascination while he showed Tessa how to weave a cat’s cradle with a loop of string. I’d seen that done in books but not in real life. With a twist of his wrists, he could make a swing dangle from the loop, then he’d twist again and make a rowboat.

  What really fascinated me was when he said that my mother used to send him books that showed him how to do things. I knew my mother had never visited my father in prison. In fact, she didn’t go to the trial, or, to my knowledge, had she ever seen him after their wedding night. To say that she’d discouraged me from wanting to visit him was an understatement. Pat had tried to get me to visit my father, but I hadn’t even bothered to answer her.

  But I heard Toodles say that his wife—and he said the name with great affection—had sent him how-to books, so he’d learned to do a lot of really interesting things. “She sent him kids’ books,” Noble said softly when he saw me staring. “Get him to do some magic tricks.”

  I looked down at my book and pretended I wasn’t observing the lot of them.

  Noble had always been one of those really useful men. From an early age, he’d taken to tools the way I’d taken to words. As pre-schoolers, I’d imagined things and he’d built them.

  First, Noble tore into the grapevines that had overgrown a rotting covered seat. Within minutes, he’d pruned the vines in what I was sure was a professional manner. Nate was there and he stood back in awe. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

  “Worked for a landscape company for a few years,” Noble said as he wiggled the old wood that supported the vines.

  “I’ll help you tear it out,” Nate said, but Noble stopped him.

  “There’s good in it yet. You got any wood around here, something I could use to repair this?”

  “Sure,” Nate said. “There’s a pile of boards behind Jackie’s house.”

  “Jackie’s house” turned out to be her studio. Looking over my book, I watched as Nate and Noble disappeared behind the studio to look for wood that I didn’t know was there. Meanwhile, my jea