“Thanks for doing this, Cinders. I mean it. You’ve made coming back far easier than I feared it would be.”
“I meant it when I said I was happy to see you. Beth’s a lucky girl.”
“We’ll see you soon.”
I could hear the smile in Alaric’s voice, and it made me smile too.
“See ya.”
Dammit, I couldn’t put this off any longer. Once Alaric hung up, I traipsed back to the car. Road trip. Yay. I only hoped Dyson had gotten worse at hiding over the years.
Penngrove was a Hallmark movie come to life. Twee little shops, a bakery run by two bubbly sisters, a cutesy library, a gallery full of local art, and an auto repair shop staffed by an impossibly hot mechanic, which we found out when the Porsche got a puncture driving past the Christmas tree farm. I smiled at the dude. Black saw me and shot daggers from his eyes. Realised what he’d done. Attempted to smile himself, and when that didn’t work out, he tipped the guy a hundred bucks. I had to give him points for effort.
And we tried everything we could think of to find Dyson. After breakfast at the Penngrove Lodge Hotel each morning, we took Barkley for a walk around town so we could be nosy. Yes, Barkley. We hadn’t intended to bring her, but she’d jumped into the car as we were leaving and refused to get out. Black cursed liberally, but he’d developed a soft spot for the mutt whether he admitted it or not.
A week into the search, we were still no farther forward. But we didn’t have many clues to go on—just the call to the feed store, the fact that Dyson had a deep knowledge of art and an affinity for boats, and a possible fondness of Chinese food. Penngrove didn’t have a Chinese restaurant, and it was twenty miles from the sea, which left art and animals. The feed store catered to everything from hamsters to horses, from geese to guppies, so there was no way to know whether Dyson kept farm animals or fish or feathered friends. And the art on show in the town was definitely on the amateur side.
I’d dyed my hair brown to lessen the risk of Dyson recognising me, and although Black’s size usually worked against him on surveillance jobs, here it didn’t matter so much because we weren’t trying to sneak around. Plus Dyson had never seen him. Even so, he’d taken to wearing glasses and a day’s worth of stubble. If anything, I was the one who should have been jealous because all the local girls kept staring at him, and the waitress in the diner had not-so-subtly written her phone number on the receipt. Dolly at the café paid him particular attention too, but I didn’t mind that because she was about eighty and it meant we got free cake.
The other advantage? The café was right opposite the feed store, and Dolly saved the table in the window for us each lunchtime because she knew it was our favourite.
“I’ve made peach cobbler today, and apple pie,” she told us when we walked in on Thursday, a week to the day after our arrival in Penngrove. Black had placated Sloane over the scheduling, but she was still juggling like crazy to keep us in town. We couldn’t stay there forever. “And we’ve got fresh Chesapeake Bay crabs, big ones.”
“Salad?” Black asked, the same as he did every day. “What about salad?”
Dolly’s answer was always the same too. She laughed.
“A big man like you can’t live on salad. I’ll bring you ham biscuits.”
“I’ll need to have my arteries scraped when I get back,” he muttered.
Things were still frosty between us. It reminded me of the weeks right after I moved to the US, those hellish days where I respected his abilities but his presence exhausted me. For sure he’d had more sleep than yours truly.
“Put me down for the apple pie. And the peach cobbler. And do you have any of those stoneground pancakes?”
I glanced at Black, daring him to challenge me, but he stayed quiet. Good plan.
“Of course I do, honey-pie. I’ll fix them right up.” She pinched Black’s cheeks, and I turned my snort into a cough. “And I’ll bring all the fixins with your ham biscuits, handsome.”
“I think she likes you,” I stage whispered as she swished off to the kitchen.
“If I were forty years older…”
We lapsed into silence. I’d taken to bringing a book with me so I didn’t have to talk, and I bet Black was bang up to date with his emails. I breathed a sigh of relief when Dolly came back with the food.
“Eat, eat. What are you doing this afternoon? There’s a classic automobile show over in Suffolk.”
“I’m going to a painting class at the Marshall Gallery. We’re doing dolphins.”
Which should be fun since I couldn’t draw for shit.
“Oh, you’ll have a wonderful time. Who’s teaching you? Loretta? She’s such a talented artist. Quite young, but she went to some fancy art school in New York.” Dolly pointed at a vivid landscape on the wall opposite. “That’s one of hers.”
Way to make me feel inferior. It was no Monet, but at least the boat looked like a boat rather than a tadpole.
“I’m looking forward to it.”
“And what are you doing, sugar-pie? Are you gunna paint fishes too?”
“I’m taking Barkley to a dog-training class.”
At the sound of her name, Barkley lifted her head. Dolly didn’t mind her coming inside as long as she lay quietly under the table, and now the grey-haired woman picked a piece of discarded pie crust from an empty plate at the next table and held it out for Barkley to snaffle.
“But she’s such a good girl already.”
Black pulled Barkley’s nose out of Dolly’s crotch.
“Her obedience needs work. She’s
