Clobbered by Camembert

“Do you think he’ll come back?”

Jordan chuckled. “I doubt it. You probably scared him more than he scared you.”

That might have been true of a mouse, but I wasn’t so sure about a thief.

Jordan drew me in tighter. “Look, whether you’re ready to accept it or not, the world is changing. Providence is changing.”

“Don’t say that.” I loved our town, loved the small-town feel, and the fact that most everybody knew and liked everybody else.

“It’s expanding, and with growth …” Jordan let the sentence hang and kissed my forehead. “People are not as good as you believe them to be.”

A shiver ran through me. Was Jordan one of those people? I pressed away from him. “Speaking of which, you told me something the other day.”

He quirked a grin. “That I love and adore you?”

“That you were taught how to make cheese by a cheese maker named Jeremy Montgomery.”

Jordan’s face grew quiet.

“He died before you were born,” I said.

His expression didn’t change. He wasn’t outraged. He was, in a word, calm. Deadly calm. I wanted to pound his chest. How could he be so composed when my insides were as squishy as an overripe cheese?

“Are you checking up on me?”

“Not me … Meredith …” I swallowed hard, felt my cheeks flush. “She asked how you learned to make cheese, so I told her, and she was intrigued and did a Google search, and …” No matter how hard I tried, I wouldn’t be able to get out from under this kettle of glop.

“Do you trust me?” he asked, his voice throaty.

“I do. I want to. But I need to know everything about you. Everything.” I drew in a deep breath and let it out. A spent balloon couldn’t feel more limp. “I promise I won’t tell anybody anything you reveal to me. I know you’re worried about Jacky’s husband coming after her.” Jacky’s husband had abused her. With Jordan’s help, Jacky had moved from New Jersey and changed her identity.

“Jacky’s husband will never come to Providence,” Jordan said.

How could he be so sure?

Jordan ran his fingers down my arms and took hold of my hands. “I’ll bet Meredith looked up the wrong Jeremy Montgomery. Have her try Jeremy K. Montgomery.”

“K?”

“For Kenneth. I didn’t lie. I was a teen when I learned to make cheese. J.K. was Jeremy’s son.”

At that moment, Jacky burst into the tent, her infant strapped to her chest in a BabyBjorn pack. “Jordan, thank God you’re here.” She looked pale, her lustrous brown hair windblown. “My car broke down. Cecily and I need a ride. She has a high fever. The doc is way the heck out on the Emerald Pastures farm.”

Jordan looked at me for permission. I said, “Go.”

He kissed me goodbye, then flew with Jacky and the baby into the night.

CHAPTER

Life can be fortuitous, or it can smack you upside the head with bad timing. The more I thought about how quickly Jordan had fled Le Petit Fromagerie, the more upset I got. I know, I know. I gave him permission to go, but I felt stretched as thin as taffy and I wanted answers. Real answers, not simply another clue. Was he worried that if he told me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth that I would blab? I wasn’t that kind of person. That was Sylvie and a whole bunch of other people, but not me.

“Jordan Pace, you’re going to tell me about your past or else,” I muttered. Or else sounded so silly. Would I walk away from him? To what? When I was a senior in high school, I had threatened Chip with an or else. Either he attended OSU with me or else. He said he wouldn’t, but at the last minute—thanks to a full scholarship—he switched. What if he hadn’t? Would I have ended our relationship? Would I have taken an entirely different path in life?

Not eager to rehash my life’s decisions, I closed up the tent, described the petty thief to security so they could be on the alert, and hustled back to The Cheese Shop. I turned on lights as I went, first to the kitchen for a snack and then to the office.

Rags leaped from the office chair and bounded to my side. He nudged my calves with his head and did a little samba.

“No, I didn’t forget you, fella. I’d planned to get here earlier, but life came at me fast.” I sighed and recited a line from a Robert Burns’ poem. “‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.’”

Rags meowed, as if in agreement.

I set my plate of green apple slices and Pace Hill Farm Gouda—a tribute to the task at hand—on the desk, nestled into the office chair, and patted my thigh. “Up!”

Rags hunkered down and sprang into my lap. Before he settled in, he stared at the Gouda. I broke off a teensy corner. He licked it from my fingers, padded in a circle until he found the right spot, and tucked himself into a coil.

“Let’s see what we’ve got.” After pairing a piece of cheese with apple and popping it into my mouth, I woke up my computer with a quick press of a key and clacked the keyboard with my fingertips. Using Google, I searched for Jeremy Montgomery, middle initial K for Kenneth. There were more than two hundred thousand possibilities, and none on the first page looked to be a perfect match. I moaned, wishing mysteries were easier to solve.

Jeremy Kostura was a ditch digger from Montgomery County. Jeremy L. Montgomery was an attorney at law. Duncan K. Montgomery had served in the Civil War. Jeremy G. Montgomery was a player on the K (for Kansas University) football squad.

Go team.

I added Britain to my search and the word cheese, but only the deceased Jeremy Montgomery’s name came up. No sons were mentioned.

A heavy feeling of foreboding engulfed me. Was Jordan lying to protect me? His sister had been married to a bad man. What if Jordan had been associated with a bad man? He said Jacky’s husband would never find her. Was that because he was dead? How else could Jordan be sure that the man wouldn’t come calling?

I banged my hand on the desktop. “Rats, rats, rats!”

Rags’s head popped to attention.

“Sorry, fella. Not you.” I sighed. How could I explain to my sweet pet that the words rats and Rags were not the same? I scruffed his ears to help him fall back to sleep and tried one more search, only this time I entered: Kenneth Montgomery, thinking perhaps this elusive cheese maker didn’t use his first name.

As before, lots of possibilities emerged. An entry halfway down the third page of results caught my eye. J. Kenneth Montgomery was the name of a protagonist in a novel. Montgomery’s occupation: international spy.

I leaned back in my chair, ideas exploding in my brain like fireworks. Had Jordan expected me to stumble upon this name? Was he trying to reveal that he was a spy?

Oh, please, Charlotte, be realistic. Jordan is no Jason Bourne. He’s a cheese farmer. An affineur. A spy doesn’t learn the art of affinage. There’s got to be some other explanation.

But I couldn’t fathom what it was.

* * *

The next morning, while I stood behind the cheese counter and laid out a selection of cheeses for the afternoon tasting class, I sorted through my feelings about last night’s discovery. If Jordan was a spy, could I live with that? What if he had killed someone in the line of duty?

I called him on the telephone, but he didn’t answer. He was probably making his morning rounds on the farm. There was always so much to do: milk the cows, check the temperatures on the cheese caves, and ensure that the apparatuses used to rotate the cheeses were in good operating order. I left a message for him to return my call and