Stranger in the Moonlight (Edilean 7)

“The town doctor and the sheriff. You are a well-connected young woman.”

“What’s our story going to be? Will you tell people Lucy Cooper is your mother?”

“She asked for a week to break the news to Layton that she’s married and has a kid.”

“If she says it like that he’ll be expecting a nine-year-old.”

“How old does your mother think you are?” Travis asked.

“Five,” Kim answered, and they laughed. “What if we tell the truth but leave out that the lady who sews, Lucy Cooper, is the same as Mrs. Merritt? You visited as a child, we met, you grew up, and have now returned to Edilean for a three-week holiday.”

Travis’s eyes lit up. “If I can get Mom to postpone telling Layton, I could get to know him before she tells who I am.”

“I think we have a plan,” Kim said and they exchanged smiles.

Four

Joe Layton unlocked his office and grimaced at the sight of the papers on his desk. Yet again he wondered what the hell he was doing starting over at his age. The old feeling of resentment welled up in him. He’d thought he was going to spend his life in New Jersey running the hardware store his grandfather had started. He’d never thought of it as wildly ambitious or something that anyone would covet. But then his son, Joey, got married, had kids, and his wife had seen Layton Hardware as a gold mine, something that she’d kill to have.

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sp; If she hadn’t wanted it all for Joe’s grandkids he would have fought her with all he had. But Joe’s heart wasn’t in the battle. In fact he rather liked that the woman was ambitious for her children.

When his daughter, Jecca, decided to marry some man in little Edilean, Virginia, Joe saw it as a way out of the whole mess. At the time, it had seemed simple. He had money in the bank, so he’d use that to open a store in Virginia. His daughter-in-law, Sheila, had screamed that Joe had “no right” to take what he’d earned over the years, that he should “leave” it for them. She spoke as though Joe’s death was imminent. Joe had reached his limit of generosity. He knew his daughter-in-law wanted to buy one of those big houses in something called a “gated community.”

“Gated?” he’d said with a smirk when he’d first heard the term.

“Yeah!” Sheila had said with her usual belligerence. Unless she was trying to sell someone something, she let people know she was ready to fight. “With a guard out front. For protection.”

“From what?” Joe asked in the same tone. “From all the photographers hounding you? They want a picture of Joe Layton’s daughter-in-law?”

Whenever Sheila and he got into it, Joey left the room. He refused to be drawn into their arguments. But Joe knew his son wanted to run his own business. Sometimes Joe wondered if his son had married Sheila because he knew she’d stand up to his father. There were even times when Joe thought maybe his son had put his wife up to taking over the store. Heaven knew Sheila didn’t have enough brains to figure out how her father-in-law could leave his own business.

One afternoon when Sheila had been on Joe’s case about selling some damned curtains in his hardware store, he received a text message from some man he’d never heard of. The man said he was in love with Jecca, wanted to marry her, and how could he win her?

Love was the last thing Joe was thinking of. Between Sheila shouting, Joey skulking off in the next room, and hearing that some guy wanted to marry his daughter, Joe cracked. On impulse—something he never gave in to—he replied to the man by asking if that little town had a hardware store. If Joe’s dear, sweet daughter was going to move there, he might as well go too. He was about to push send when he added that he wanted more photos of the pretty woman, Lucy Cooper, who Jecca had sent pictures of and who she’d raved about.

At the time, Joe had only thought how the woman had been the mother Jecca had never had. Joe’s wife, the love of his life, had died when Jecca was little more than a baby. After that he’d been too busy with earning a living and raising two kids to try to find another bride. He’d made do with a few dates now and then, and even one sort of serious affair, but all the women came up short. Jecca said he wanted a clone of her mother, not a real person, and Joe knew she was right.

But then, Jecca almost always was right. Not that he would ever tell her that, but that’s how he felt.

When he’d heard she was marrying a doctor, he was sure she was making a big mistake. Jecca came from a solidly blue-collar background. How would she deal with a la-di-dah doctor? But Dr. Tris—as people called him—had turned out to be okay. More than okay. He was mad about Jecca and gave up a lot to be with her.

It was through Tristan that Joe was going to be able to open the hardware store in Edilean. Tris pretty much gave him the old building. That it needed a massive renovation was beside the point.

In New Jersey, over the years Joe had helped out a lot of men. When they were out of work, he’d found them jobs. When they needed supplies for a job, he’d let them have credit. When they didn’t get paid, Joe held their notes for as long as it took.

They’d repaid him in loyalty, by going to him instead of the big franchises, but even with that, Joe’s business was going down. He would have died before he admitted it, but Sheila’s idea of opening a design department might have been a good one.

He also would never have admitted that he had less money than he said he did. He didn’t lie exactly, just sort of rounded off the numbers.

He and Jecca had had one of their big fights when Joe said he was bringing in construction guys from New Jersey to do the remodeling. He’d said the reason was because he trusted the men. The truth was that Joe collected on a lot of favors. He called men he hadn’t talked to in ten years. With few exceptions, they drove down to little Edilean and put in one, two, or three days of work. Some men had been with Joe so long they sent their grandsons—or daughters, an idea Joe had no problem with. His daughter had always worked for him.

For the most part, they worked at their own expense. Joe paid some of the younger guys, but his old friends refused any payment.

“See that Skil saw?” one man asked. “You sold that to me seventeen years ago this June. It’s been repaired by your two kids more times than I can count. I figure I owe you the money I saved by not buying new every time the old one broke.”

Joe had acted as the contractor on the job and had overseen the men who came in at all hours of the day or night. Some guys needed no direction, but some of them were so green he had to show them which end of a nail gun to hold.