laid a stack of napkins next to the crabs. “This always gets messy.”
He also didn’t know many women who would agree to picking steamed crabs for lunch. “Have you lived here all your life?” His information-gathering on Isobel Suarez had to start somewhere.
“Yep. Except for college.”
“You have a master’s degree, right?”
Reaching for a crab, she expertly cracked it. “I went straight through, summers too. I was lucky enough to earn a few scholarships to take some of burden off of Dad. The rest were loans, but I finished paying them off last year.”
She sounded glad about that and he realized she was the responsible type. Unable to take his eyes from her, he watched as she picked apart a crab, slipped some of the meat from one of the claws, and popped it into her mouth. She licked her lips and he felt as if his pulse was going to run away. She seemed oblivious to the effect she was having on him.
“Did you go to college?” She colored a bit. “I mean I heard you were a detective with the Boston P.D. before you took a job with the state.” She used her fingers to separate another succulent piece of crab.
“I went to college and earned a degree in criminal justice before I joined the police force.”
“Why did you leave the Boston P.D.?”
He went silent for a moment, realizing just how uncomfortable it could be to answer questions that went too deep or zeroed in on what he wanted to talk about least. “I left because I was getting too cynical.” He nodded to the dish of cheese fries. “Sure you don’t want one? Mrs. Sanford said they’re as good as everything else here.”
Isobel took a good long look at them, then at the crab she was picking. Finally, she smiled. “Maybe just one.” She picked up a fry with a layer of cheese, took a bite from the end…and savored it.
Neil shifted on the bench. Damn it, she was turning him on with no effort at all. He felt as if he’d been in a deep freeze and Isobel had suddenly pushed the warm current button.
She took another bite of the large fry and set it down on a napkin. “Why is it that everything that’s pleasurable comes with a price tag?”
“Don’t most things come with a price tag?”
Their table was cockeyed on the grass and they could both see the river. She looked toward it now. “You know that old line, the best things in life are free?”
He nodded as he studied her profile, her patrician nose, her high cheekbones, the few wisps of stray curls that brushed her cheek in front of her ear.
She went on. “I used to believe that was true. And maybe it is true when you’re young. But as you get older, everything seems to have a price.”
He wondered what she was thinking about that made her sad, but he knew exactly what she meant. His gaze followed hers to the water and he almost recoiled from it. The sight of the river brought memories that were painful. He never should have brought her here. He’d thought his mind would be on the investigation and he would dive into the usual background questions. He never imagined they’d get into a conversation like this.
“Are you involved with anyone?” he asked her, surprising himself.
Her big brown eyes found his and for a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to answer him, or that maybe she would say it was none of his business, which it wasn’t.
“No, I’m not involved with anyone. How about you?”
“Nope. No strings. No ties that bind. With my job, any kind of a relationship would be difficult. I travel. I have a home base but I’m rarely there.”
“Boston?”
“Yeah. It’s home, but not really. Do you have family?” he asked her. “I mean besides your dad.”
“I have a sister, Debbie, who lives here in Walnut River. We were always close but since her divorce, I think we’ve gotten even closer. We have a younger brother, Jacob, who’s an adventurer. I don’t think he’ll ever settle down. One month he’s in Australia surfing, the next he’s in South America helping to save the rain forest.”
“Lives in the moment?” Neil asked.
“Totally.”
“How long ago did you lose your mom?”
“Four years ago. I moved back in with Dad after she died because he just seemed so…lost. He was having more problems with his arthritis and had fallen down the basement steps one day when he’d done some laundry and hurt his shoulder. So it just seemed the right thing to do.”
“You were on your own before that?”
“Oh, sure. Since college. I had my own apartment over on Concord.”
“It must have been hard for you, moving back home.” He absolutely couldn’t imagine it, but then he didn’t have the relationship with his parents that Isobel obviously had with her dad.
“It was really odd moving back home. I mean, I had been in and out of the house ever since college, dinners on Sundays, stopping in to see how my parents were. But when I moved back into my old room, it was like I recognized it but I’d outgrown it. I didn’t want to change anything because Mom had decorated it for me and that was part of her. Yet it was a young girl’s room and I wasn’t young anymore.”
“What did you do?” he asked, curious.
“I packed away my cabinet of dolls, put the cupboard in the basement and moved in my computer hutch and printer. I couldn’t bear to part with the latch-hook rug my mom had made, but I hung a watercolor I had at my apartment and bought new curtains. A mixture of yesterday and today.”
“So living with your dad isn’t temporary?”
“I don’t see how it can be. He needs me and I can’t turn away from that.”
Neil admired what Isobel was doing. How many thirty-somethings would give up their life to help out a parent? “You’re fortunate to be close to your family.”
“You’re not?”
He’d left himself wide open for that one. “There’s a lot of distance between us, especially between me and my father.”
She broke apart another crab. “Is that your doing or his?”
If anyone else had asked him that question, he would have clammed up. But Isobel’s lack of guile urged him to be forthright, too. “I’m not sure anymore. At one time he put it there. Now we both keep it there.”
“That’s a shame. Because anything can happen at any time.”
That was a truth he’d experienced as a teenager.
They ate in silence for the next little while, listening to the birds that had found their way to the maples, to the sound of the breeze rustling the laurels and the foliage along the river, to the crunch of gravel as cars came and went. Whenever their gazes met, he felt heat rise up to his
