Forever: A Novel of Good and Evil Love and Hope Read online

  For the entire trip to Connecticut, Darci had sat on the edge of the backseat and asked the driver questions. By the time they arrived in the remote area of northern Connecticut where the town of Camwell was located, she knew more about him than his last two wives had.

  So now she was here, but Adam Montgomery was nowhere to be seen. She was much too full of energy to want to stay in the guest house and unpack her suitcase. Besides, that would take all of five minutes. Instead, she wanted to go exploring—and the first place she planned to explore was the other bedroom.

  His room was quite a bit larger than hers, and it had two queen-size beds in it. She ran her hand over a bedspread and wondered which bed he used; then she went to the closet. It was full of clothes. It was autumn in New England, and the wardrobe inside Mr. Montgomery’s closet looked as though it had been made for the season and the place. When she ran her hand over one of his corduroy shirts, she couldn’t help but notice that the only label inside bore his initials. In other words, they were clothes custom-tailored just for him. There were flannels and corduroys and woolens, and cotton shirts that were impossibly soft. On the floor of the closet were six pairs of shoes, all with wooden shoe trees inside them.

  “Imagine that,” Darci said aloud. “Six pairs of shoes.”

  She snooped through the drawers in the room, then went into his bathroom and looked through everything. She opened every bottle, smelled the contents, touched every item. When she left his room, she knew that she would be able to recognize him just by the smell of him, if she had to.

  The problem now was, where was he? At six P.M., she

  walked back to the hotel’s main house and wandered into every room that wasn’t locked. She said hello to the kitchen staff and asked them their names. She introduced herself to the housekeeping people, and they let her explore the basement of the house. At eight, she went back outside, pulling the jacket of her suit close about her as it was quite cool. She checked the guest house again, but Mr. Montgomery still wasn’t there, so Darci went out again. He had a heavy flannel shirt jacket in his closet that she would have loved to put on, but she thought that that might be overstepping the bounds, so she buttoned her jacket and walked faster.

  A couple of times, she stood still, closed her eyes, and let her mind concentrate on the image of the man she’d met. Where was he? When she heard someone walking, not on the pathway but through the dried leaves on the ground, Darci stopped walking and inhaled. She had found him. Without another thought, she began to follow him.

  He didn’t use the town’s sidewalks but moved from lawn to lawn, and she followed him around Camwell for nearly an hour before she spoke. “What are you looking for?”

  Adam nearly jumped out of his skin at the sound of her voice so near, but he recovered himself as soon as he realized who she was. She was standing under a streetlight, wearing the same thin, worn suit that he’d first seen her in, and she looked so fragile that he thought that if he sneezed, she’d probably go flying backward. “Why aren’t you at the hotel?”

  “I wanted to find you and ask you what you want me to do. For my job, that is,” she said, smiling up at him. He looked great, she thought. He had on a fashionably stressed leather jacket over an Aran sweater, and his jeans were perfectly faded.

  “I planned to talk to you about your job when I saw you,” he said, his voice full of annoyance.

  “So what were you doing out here?”

  It was on the tip of Adam’s tongue to tell her that it was none of her business, but if he was going to have to spend time with her, he didn’t want to anger her. In fact, it would be better to get on her good side. He forced a smile. “I’ll tell you everything all in good time.”

  “If you’re searching the town for available sex, I’d be willing,” Darci said, then batted her pale eyelashes at him.

  For a moment Adam wasn’t sure that he’d heard her right, so he just blinked at her.

  Then, as he looked down at her, clasping her arms about herself to keep warm, the idea of intimacy with this shivering girl suddenly seemed very funny. He couldn’t contain his laughter. And as he laughed, his annoyance fled. What she lacked in other areas, she obviously made up for in having a good sense of humor, he thought.

  “Come on,” he said good-naturedly, “there’s a diner down the street. Let’s go get something to warm you up.”

  Minutes later, they were inside a bright coffee shop and he’d ushered her to a booth. The waitress, a tall, thin woman in a blue uniform with a little white apron, asked what they wanted. “Coffee?” Adam asked Darci and she nodded.

  “Anything to eat?” the waitress asked, bored.

  “No,” Adam said, then he looked across the table at Darci. “Actually, you could bring us a couple of pieces of pie, apple if you have it.”

  “This is New England, it’s October, and you ask if we have apple pie,” the waitress said as she went away, chuckling.

  Adam turned to Darci. “Thanks. That was the best laugh I’ve had in a long time.”

  The waitress set two thick green mugs in front of them and filled them with coffee. Adam sipped his black as he watched Darci put three teaspoons of sugar in hers, then empty four tiny paper cups of cream into it. When she had the coffee to her liking, she drank deeply, then held the mug in her palms to warm them.

  “Glad to be of help,” Darci said, looking up at him with big eyes. “So, what were you looking for tonight?” When the waitress set two big wedges of pie in front of them, Darci dug into hers, but that didn’t stop her from looking up at Adam in question.

  “How did you find me?” he asked, avoiding her question.

  “I applied my True Persuasion to you.”

  “Oh,” he said, his lips twitching in a smile. “And what is that?”

  “If you think about something hard enough, you can make it happen. I just thought really hard about your coming close to where I was and you came.”

  “I see,” Adam said, his smile broader.

  “So what were you looking for?”

  “Actually, I can’t tell you yet,” he said, smiling in what he hoped was a fatherly way. “At least there’s no reason to tell you yet.”

  “Are you going to eat your pie?” she asked.

  Still smiling, he shoved his untouched plate toward her. “You want me to work for you, but you don’t want me to know what it is that you’re doing. Not yet anyway. So what has to happen before you’re allowed to tell me? Earthquake? Hurricane? Microsoft buys China?”

  He chuckled. “Very funny. Nothing has to happen. I just need to find something first then I’ll be able to tell you.”

  “Ah. I see,” she said.

  “You see what?” he asked, feeling more annoyed than he wanted to feel. Why wasn’t this snippet of a girl backing off ?

  “The hero myth. You have to find the treasure first, then you stand on it and beat your chest in triumph while the heroine swoons at your feet.”

  “Beat my—” For a moment, all Adam could do was blink at her. Women didn’t usually talk to him like this. Usually women...well,women had never been a problem in his life. Forcing himself to relax, he smiled at her. “All right, I guess you’ll have to be told sooner or later.” Standing up, he looked around the restaurant to make sure that there was no one who could hear him near their booth. When he was sure that he wouldn’t be overheard, he sat back down, leaned toward her, and said quietly, “There’s a witches’ coven in this village, and I’m trying to find out where it meets.”

  Calmly, Darci continued sipping her coffee. Her lack of reaction annoyed him. There wasn’t so much as a flicker of interest in her eyes.

  “Have you asked anyone where it is?”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said? It’s a witches’ coven. Evil. This one is particularly bad. A coven is not exactly something that’s held out in the open.”

  “But this is a small town,” Darci said as she used the side of her fork to scrape her plate. She’d eaten both pieces of pie.