LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Damn it, Curly!”

      The stupid goat licked the windowsill, and Joe cursed again. Erasing from his mind all memory of the erotic dream from hell, he reached for his boots and jeans.

      Lila was closing the gate when she noticed Joe leading the last missing goat by a leash fashioned from his belt. “Thank goodness you found her,” she said. “I managed to get these three back in the corral and was wondering where that one had gone.”

      He put the goat with those already inside the enclosure. The others frolicked, but the white one nuzzled Joe, who moved away, out of its reach.

      “I think she has a crush on you.”

      He mumbled something unintelligible under his breath then clamped his mouth shut. An awkward silence followed.

      Finally, she said, “Pepper and I got back late last night. Neither of her business ventures turned out as she’d hoped.”

      “She had two?”

      “There’s an arena football team for sale in South Carolina and an alpaca ranch for sale right here in Virginia.”

      “Does she know anything about football or alpacas?”

      “Well, no, but that never stopped her in the past. Clinically, she’s the spoiled daughter of extremely wealthy parents. She has two perfect older sisters, a workaholic father, a perfectionist mother and a controlling grandfather.”

      “Just your average all-American family.”

      Lila was tempted to smile. The sun had burned off the fog here, but it swirled in the foothills in the distance, filtering light and obscuring the mountains from view.

      Resting his forearms on the fence he’d recently mended, Joe said, “A few nights ago, Bud Streeter recognized you. I didn’t tell him he was right, but I thought you should know. Word’s out.”

      “It isn’t exactly a secret. The media made sure of that. How long have you known?”

      “It took me a few days to place where I’d seen you. I catch a lot of late-night TV at the tavern.”

      “It seems we’re both famous,” she said.

      “More like infamous.”

      They looked at each other, both curious, but neither willing to voice their questions out loud.

      Eventually, Joe said, “Not much happens in small towns, but what you hear makes up for it.”

      “This is my first exposure to life in a small town. Myrtle Ann must have seen me on television. Pepper thinks that’s why she left The Meadows to me. You cared for her and this property. I don’t understand why she didn’t leave it to you.”

      “I don’t need it. Noreen’s disappearance cost me my reputation, my concentration and my future, but I’m far from destitute.”

      Turning her back on the animals, Lila surveyed her new home. The rising sun backlit the uneven lines of the house and accentuated the sag in the porch roof. The imperfections made the house look almost human, like lines on a wizened old woman’s face. Standing near the fence, the breeze in her hair and dew wicking into her canvas shoes, she’d never been so appreciative of someone she’d never met. “Thanks to Myrtle Ann, I’m not destitute, either.”

      “Still,” he said, “now that people know who you are, they’re going to talk. The former psychic and the burned-out baseball player suspected of killing his wife.”

      After another awkward silence, Lila said, “As long as it’s just idle gossip.”

      Why that struck either of them as funny, she didn’t know, but she started to laugh, and so did he. Once they started, neither could stop. She snorted embarrassingly. He roared, even more out of practice than she was. They were bad at laughing. It made them laugh harder, until they were holding their stomachs, chests heaving, guffawing until they hurt. Oh, it felt good.

      Lila had often counseled patients through grief and despair. How many times had she reassured them that one day they would be able to laugh again and mean it?

      “My mother is going to be happy to hear I’ve taken my own advice,” she said, drying her cheeks with her fingertips.

      She wound up telling Joe about the times her mother had stood up to obnoxious reporters and Lila’s former patients who’d threatened to sue. Looking back, she didn’t know how she would have gotten though the ridicule and media circus without her fierce, slight, eccentric mother.

      Lila had read the newspaper accounts of Joe’s baseball career and his volatile relationship with his wife. She knew he had a daughter, but she didn’t recall reading anything about any extended family. As a counselor, and as an only child, she was always curious about families. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

      “Just my dad and my daughter. Neither of them are one hundred percent certain I didn’t do it.”

      She could have done quite well without that particular bit of information. She must have looked at him for a long time, because he glanced nervously at her, prompting her to ask the question on her mind. “Why did you move here?”

      “What do you mean, why?”

      “You have a beautiful house in Murray. From what I hear, it has every imaginable luxury.”

      He stared across the meadows, past the fruit trees and the pond, to the mountains, more visible now. “Noreen had to have that house, so I had it built for her. There’s nothing for me there. Besides, it doesn’t have this.”

      Lila was looking at him, not the view. “There’s no peace there,” she said quietly.

      A muscle worked in his jaw. “That’s right, there isn’t.”

      She understood, and it should have scared her. The fact that it didn’t should have sent her sprinting back to the house. Instead, she watched him walk away.

      It didn’t take him long to reach the pond. He picked up a stone on his way by, and with a flick of his wrist that was probably second nature, he sent it skipping across the water. Strangely, he didn’t stick around to count the skips or watch it sink.

      The screen door bounced three times, but Lila didn’t take her eyes off the pond. The water glinted in the morning sunshine, the surface now rippling in five places, spreading outward in a perfect, silent rhythm, propelled by a force too gentle to feel and too powerful to control. By the time the ripples touched the grassy edges on all sides, the middle was smooth again. Like those ripples, Joe was a power unto himself, too. Maybe everyone was.

      She came out of her stupor to see that Pepper was on the porch. Tall, svelte and sleepy-looking, her friend stared toward the cabin, a quilt wrapped around her shoulders, both hands around a cup of steaming coffee. “There went one fine specimen of a man. It almost wouldn’t matter if he did it.”

      “I don’t think he did.”

      Pepper turned her head slowly, her short blond hair sticking up on one side. “Oh no?”

      Not one to waste precious energy on pretense, Lila only shrugged.

      “You’re falling for him,” Pepper said.

      “I wouldn’t go that far.”

      “Think about it, Lila. He has nothing to offer you, at least nothing except heartache, and maybe an early death.”

      “It’s not as if I’m planning to propose. Believe me, Alex cured me of the very idea of marriage. I just don’t think Joe hurt his wife.”

      “Why don’t you ask him?” Pepper said. “No, wait, the police already did.”

      “And he said he didn’t kill Noreen.”

      “I’d say that, too,” Pepper grumbled.

      “I think he’s telling the truth.”

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