CHAPTER 21
Tracy heard that alarm system going off as she drove up the driveway of what had been Dan O’Leary’s childhood home. She did not recognize the Cape Cod house on the large lot, recalling a one-story yellow clapboard rambler. Set back on a manicured lawn, the house was now two stories tall, with dormer windows, a large front porch, and white Adirondack sitting chairs. The clapboard had been replaced with pale blue shingles and gray trim that had a definite East Coast feel to them.
Dan opened the front door and stepped out into the light of a full moon. Two very big dogs flanked him. They looked like bulldogs on steroids, with stunted black muzzles and short hair that exposed muscular, broad chests. With them sitting at his sides, Dan looked like an Egyptian pharaoh.
Tracy stepped away from the car, shouldering her overnight bag. “Is it safe?”
“It will be, once you’re properly introduced.” Dan looked comfortable in faded jeans with a hole in one knee, a black V-neck sweater over a white T-shirt, and bare feet.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” she said, approaching on a stone path in a rich-green lawn that looked and smelled like it had been freshly mowed.
“Just hold out the back of your hand and let them smell you.”
“I really don’t like the sound of that.”
“Don’t be a ninny.”
Tracy held out her hand. The smaller of the two dogs stretched his neck and brushed his cold nose across the back of her hand. As he did, Dan said, “This is Sherlock.”
“You’re kidding?” No shit, Sherlock had been one of Dan’s favorite expressions.
Dan turned his attention to the other dog. “And this—”
“Let me guess. Ex-Lax,” she said. Dan’s other favorite boyhood expression had been smooth move, Ex-Lax.
“Now that would just be gross. No, this big boy is Rex, as in T. rex.” T. rex didn’t bother to sniff her hand. “He’s a bit more reserved than Sherlock.”
“What breed are they?”
“Rhodesian and Mastiff mix. They weigh in at a combined two hundred eighty-six pounds and their food bill is twice the size of mine. Go ahead and take them inside. I’ll put your car in the garage in case anyone is nosy.” She’d noticed a freestanding garage at the back of the property.
Tracy stepped into a den with an L-shaped couch facing a brick fireplace, over which hung a large flat-screen television. The den flowed into a kitchen with a table and chairs, granite counters, barstools, and incandescent lighting. Tile samples rested against the kitchen splash behind the sink. Dan closed the door behind her and handed her back her keys.
“You’re remodeling,” she said.
“That’s an understatement. After forty years, it needed a makeover.”
He walked into the kitchen, but the dogs kept their attention on Tracy. She dropped her bag on one of the barstools. “You’re planning on staying?”
“After all the work I just put in, I better get some enjoyment out of it.”
“You did this?”
“You don’t have to sound that surprised.” He opened the refrigerator.
“I just don’t remember you being that handy.”
Dan spoke from behind the door. “You’d be amazed what you can learn when you’re bored, motivated, and have access to the Internet. Are you hungry?”
“Don’t go to any bother, Dan.”
“No bother. I did tell you I know a great restaurant.” He returned with a plate containing four large hamburger patties. “I was just about to make my famous bacon cheeseburgers.”
She laughed. “I can feel my arteries hardening already.”
“Please don’t tell me you’ve become one of those grain-eating vegan types.”
“With my schedule? I’m lucky to see a vegetable unless it’s a tomato on a Whopper bun.”
“Technically, a tomato is a fruit.”
“Whatever. What, are you also a horticulturist now?”
“If you’re nice, after dinner I’ll show you my vegetable garden.”
“You must have been really bored.” She stepped to his side of the counter. “What can I do to help?” Side by side, Dan was a good four inches taller. The sweater accentuated his broad shoulders and a trim chest. She elbowed him playfully and hit a solid torso. “I seem to recall a guy with a lot more baby fat. I know it isn’t the diet.”
“Yeah, well some of us weren’t blessed with the Crosswhite long legs and muscle-tone gene.”
“I’ll have you know I work out four days a week,” she said.
“I’ll have you know it shows.”
“Oh God, I sounded like one of those middle-age women fishing for a compliment, didn’t I?”
“If you were, I was hooked. Come on, why don’t I show you to your room? You can take a hot shower and relax while I get dinner started.”
“I think that sounds even better.” She grabbed her bag and followed him to the stairs.
“Should I have a glass of red wine waiting, or are you going to tell me you’ve given up alcohol?”
“Only the kind that’s good for you.”
She followed him into a room at the top of the stairs and was again surprised by the furnishings, a wrought-iron bed and early American antiques, with a bushy broom in one corner and a bed warmer in another. Over the bed hung a painting of a woman lighting a fire in a darkened pioneer home. Tracy dropped her bag on the bed. “Okay, I’ll buy the remodel, but no way you decorated on your own.” She guessed a girlfriend.
“Sunset Magazine.” Dan shrugged. “Like I said, I was bored.” He closed the door and left her to settle in.
Tracy sat on the edge of the bed, considering their banter, which in some respects felt like old times, though Dan was definitely now more adept at his comebacks than she remembered. She found herself smiling. Was Dan flirting with her, or were his comments just an adult version of the ribbing they used to give one another when they were kids? It had been a long time since anyone had flirted with her.
“I’ll have you know it shows?” she said, groaning at the sound of it. “Way to look needy.”
When Tracy stepped out of the shower, her limited choice of clothing became even more frustrating. She left her blouse out instead of tucking it into her jeans to create a different look and pulled her hair back into a ponytail, her crow’s-feet be damned. She applied mascara and eye shadow, added a touch of perfume to her wrists and neck, and headed downstairs to the smell of bacon and hamburgers wafting from the grill, announcers providing the play-by-play of a college football game on the flat-screen.
Dan stood at the counter beating the contents of a glass bowl with a whisk. A pie crust with lemon filling sat on the counter.
“Are you making a lemon meringue pie?”
He muted the volume on the TV. “Don’t make fun. It was my mother’s recipe and it happens to be my favorite. And if I can ever get the damn egg whites to fluff, you’ll know why.”
“You’re using the wrong bowl.”
Dan gave her a skeptical look. “How could there be a wrong bowl?”
She stepped to his side of the counter. “Where do you keep your bowls?”
He pointed to a lower cabinet. Tracy found a copper bowl, transferred the egg whites into it, and took the whisk. In no time at all, she whisked the egg whites into foam. “Mrs. Allen would be appalled. Don’t you remember anything from chemistry class?”
“Isn’t that the class I cheated off of you in?”
“You cheated off me in every class.”
“And look how well it’s done for me. I can’t even beat egg whites.”
“It has to do with one of the proteins in the egg whites reacting with the copper of the bowl’s surface. A silver-plated bowl will do the same thing.” She poured in the sugar Dan had in a measuring cup to finish the meringue, spooned it on top of the filling, and slid the pie into the oven, setting the timer. “Didn’t you promise me a glass of wine?”
He poured two glasses, handed her one, and raised his. “To old friends.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“We’re the same age,” he said.
“Haven’t you heard? Forty is the new twenty.”
“The memo hasn’t reached my back and knees. Fine.” He raised his glass again. “To good friends.”
“That’s more like it.”
She moved to the other side of the counter and sat beneath an incandescent light, watching as he turned the onions he’d added to the grill. She smelled their sweet scent. “Can I ask you something?”
“I’m an open book.”
“It’s just you here.”
“Just me and the boys,” he said. The two dogs sat at the edge of the tile between the rooms, watching as Dan walked to the fridge.
“So why did you go to the trouble?”
He opened the fridge. “You mean the remodel?”
“Everything. The remodel, the furnishings, two dogs. It must have been a lot of effort.”
He grabbed a jar of pickles and a tomato and set them on a plastic cutting board. “It was. That’s why I did it. I went through the ‘woe is me’ period, Tracy. Finding out your wife is cheating on you isn’t exactly confidence building. I felt sorry for myself for a while. Then I got angry with the world, with her, with my ex-partner for sleeping with her.” He fished out a pickle and sliced it as he continued talking. “When Mom died that put me into an even deeper funk. One morning I woke up and decided I was tired of looking at the same damn walls. I went into the toolshed, got Dad’s sledgehammer, and started knocking them down. The more I knocked down, the better I felt. Once the walls were down, the only thing I could do was rebuild.”
“So this was your diversion.”
He washed the tomato at the sink and began to cut it with precise strokes. “All I know is, the more I rebuilt, the more I realized that just because things hadn’t worked out as I’d planned didn’t mean things couldn’t work out at all. I wanted a home. I wanted a family. Getting another wife was not on the horizon, and frankly, I wasn’t looking. So I went and got Rex and Sherlock and we created a home.” The two dogs whined at the mention of their names.
“How’d you start?”
“One swing of the hammer at a time.”
“Do you ever talk to your ex?”
“Every once in a while she’ll call. Things with my partner didn’t work out.”
“She wants you back.”
He used a spatula to transfer the burgers to a plate. “I think she was fishing about the possibility at first. What she probably really misses is the country-club lifestyle. She figured out pretty quick that the guy she married didn’t exist anymore.”
Tracy smiled. “I think the finished product looks pretty good, Dan.”
He stopped transferring the sliced tomatoes and pickles from the cutting board to a plate. “Oh no.”
“What?”
“Did that sound like a middle-aged man fishing for a compliment?”
She threw a crumpled napkin at him.
Dan had set the table while she was in the shower. He placed the plate of hamburgers on it beside a tossed green salad. “This okay?” he asked.
“Fishing for another compliment?”
“You know it.”
“It’s perfect.”
As Tracy made up her burger with condiments, Dan said, “Okay, my turn. Do you still compete in those shooting tournaments?”
“I don’t really have a lot of free time.”
“But you were so good.”
“Too many painful memories. The last time I saw Sarah was the 1993 Championship in Olympia.”
“Is that why you also never come back to Cedar Grove? Because the memories are too painful?”
“Some,” she said.
“And yet you’re about to dig up those memories all over again.”
“Not dig them up, Dan. Hopefully bury them for good.”