Sheryl.”
The next-door neighbor—a tall, slender and attractive woman who always seemed to be smiling—rose from her place in the front yard where she’d been planting mums in an obscenely neat flower bed, dusting dirt from her knees and then pulling off her gardening gloves.
“Hi, Debbie.” Sheryl took a detour and headed down the walkway that led from the sidewalk to the neighbors’ front door. “Pretty day.”
Debbie’s smile widened. “I love autumn. September is my favorite time of year.”
“I like spring myself,” Sheryl said. “Autumn runs a close second, though.” She was happy to see the heat of summer wane. And traffic through town decreased substantially when the summer beach traffic let up.
Debbie studied the clear blue sky for a moment before asking, “What are you doing this weekend?”
“Sleeping, mostly,” Sheryl answered.
Debbie laughed. The woman had so much energy. She had a husband who worked on the road most of the time, three kids and a part-time job. And yet she never seemed to be overwhelmed. Did she ever sleep? Maybe that was the secret. No sleep.
“The autumn festival is next weekend, don’t forget,” Debbie said.
“I won’t forget.” How could she? Someone reminded her on a daily basis. She looked forward to her weekends, since she worked a half day on Saturday and was off on Sunday. Unless there was an emergency, of course. All her clients knew how to reach her on the weekends and in the middle of the night.
“My brother-in-law is coming to town for the festival,” Debbie said much too casually. “Maybe you can show him around while he’s here.”
“No, thanks,” Sheryl responded, not at all surprised or dismayed. Debbie was always trying to fix her up, and she was forever raving about the joys of marriage and motherhood. Sheryl had learned to take the friendly interference in stride, just as Debbie was learning to accept the fact that her new friend wasn’t at all interested in the things that made her own life complete. She wasn’t quite there yet, though.
When she’d moved to Wyatt, Sheryl had never expected her new best friend to be eleven years older than she, a married woman with three kids and an unnatural fixation for The Home and Garden Channel.
The Home and Garden Channel gave Sheryl a headache.
After talking to Debbie for a few minutes more, Sheryl headed for her own house, ready to kick off her shoes and plop down in a comfortable chair. She’d have to feed and water the animals first, but once that was done they’d let her have a breather. A short one.
Her own yard was not as well kept as Debbie’s, and was not nearly as large. Sheryl had bought the smallest house on the block, but it was more than sufficient for her needs. The clapboard ranch was square and ordinary, but there was something warm about it. The previous owners had painted the house a pale yellow, and she liked it. She had never thought of herself as a yellow-house person, but this one… She loved it. Inside there was a large kitchen, a spacious living room, a dining room, two large bedrooms and a big bathroom that needed updating but was functional and roomier than most modern ones. The attic was unfinished and strictly for storage, but the extra space was nice. After years of living in apartments, she found the yellow house was a real luxury.
Laverne waited on the deep front porch, her gray tail swishing with impatience. Sheryl collected her mail from the metal box beside the door, but waited until she’d unlocked and opened the door before leafing through the envelopes. Bills, ads, a letter from her dad.
There had been a time when something as simple as leafing through the mail had made her heart beat too fast. After she’d broken up with Michael there had been too many angry letters waiting for her in the mailbox, too many unwanted messages on her answering machine. She hadn’t heard from her ex-fiancé in four months, but still every now and then she expected him to rise up out of the bushes.
Yeah, romance was nice enough, but it just wasn’t worth the hassle.
As she walked through the front door, a chill ran down her spine. She felt as if someone was watching her. Sheryl turned around slowly, and her eyes swept the empty sidewalk. Debbie was busy working in her flower bed again, and no one else was in sight.
She brushed off the odd feeling, attributing it to unpleasant memories of her ex, and closed the door behind her.
“It’s such a long shot,” Cassie said as Hawk threw sloppily folded clothes into his suitcase. “And North Carolina is so far away. I can’t believe you’d listen to a crazy woman who accosts you in the pharmacy.”
“What makes you think she’s crazy?” Hawk glanced up as he closed the suitcase. His sister was pacing near the door, her hands clasped tightly. She wasn’t usually so tense, but with everything that had happened lately, she had just cause.
“Everything you told me about her,” Cassie snapped. “The way she dressed, the way she sneaked up on you, the completely insufficient note. An address, that’s it. How do you know that address even exists? She might’ve made it up or it might be the address of a dry cleaner or a bakery or some poor person’s house. What she said about you looking like our mother, that’s definitely crazy. What do you think you’ll find at that address, anyway? Another weird woman offering riddles about the past?”
Compared to Hawk, his sister was tiny. But the vast difference in their body mass had never stopped Cassie from standing up to him and speaking her mind.
“I don’t know what I’ll find.”
Cassie ran a nervous hand through her hair, brushing the black strands away from her face. “I know you, Hawk. You think you’re going to drive up to a house with a white picket fence, knock on the door, and our biological mother and father will come to the door with open arms, wondering where we’ve been all these years.”
He’d quit expecting anything like that years ago, though there had been a time when he’d been absolutely obsessed with finding his birth parents. “You’ll be okay while I’m gone.”
“I know I’ll be okay,” she said, a little bit calmer than she’d been a few minutes ago. “It’s just…I can’t talk to anyone else about what’s going on. They’ll think I’m nuts! And I am worried about you, you know. I don’t want you to go all that way and be disappointed when you don’t find what you expect to find.”
“I don’t expect to find anything.”
“Yes, you do,” Cassie said softly. “Hire someone to check out the address for you. You can find a private detective in North Carolina and have him check it out. That way you can stay home and no one gets hurt.”
“And what exactly would I tell this private detective?”
Cassie just pursed her lips. She knew too well that they couldn’t bring anyone else into this mix.
“I’m not a kid anymore,” Hawk said. “I don’t expect to find anything but answers about your condition.”
“My condition,” Cassie scoffed. “I hate having a ‘condition’!”
“Call me anytime you need to talk. I’ll have my cell phone on twenty-four/seven.”
His
