Three Little Words

The man saw that he’d disrupted her flow. “I’d like to speak with you after you’re finished,” he said in a low, serious voice that made her nape prickle. He walked away before she could respond.

Tess swallowed. What was that about? Why did she feel so remarkably different?

The kids were clamoring for the ending. Tess focused on the page, illustrated with a green-eyed, freckle-faced princess in a pair of bib overalls. “‘And then the, um, princess said, Even though today is beautiful, I know that tomorrow may be even better.’”

HE COULD WAIT, Tess decided. Parents were arriving to pick up the children and there were gluey planters to be shown off and books to be checked out. When the library had cleared out finally, Lucy Grant was left behind. Her single dad, Evan Grant, was a gym teacher and basketball coach at the high school. Summers, he picked up an extra paycheck with a local builder and couldn’t always get off work to deliver Lucy to her baby-sitter’s house. Usually either Tess or Beth ducked out to take her there.

Not today. Tess put Lucy’s stick planter on the windowsill to dry and settled the girl at one of the child-size tables with the second book in the Princess Ella series. Today, she’d call Evan at work. Beth would have volunteered, but her house was in the opposite direction—a long enough walk for a pregnant woman without adding a detour. And Tess couldn’t leave the library unattended, whether or not there was a smuggler on the premises. Lucy would have to wait for her father.

Tess went back to the main desk to call Evan. The stranger loitered near the magazine rack, gazing out the window at the flower garden. Maybe he was conducting a surveillance of traffic patterns. Little did he know that on Timber Avenue, there was no traffic to surveil.

After hanging up, Tess turned to Beth. “Go on home. Evan can take a break, so he’s coming for Lucy.”

Beth smiled tiredly. “Good. I don’t want to waddle any farther than I have to.”

“You can take my car if the walk is too much for you today.” Tess had been urging her assistant to quit her part-time position for the last few weeks of her pregnancy, but Beth said that waiting out the time at home alone in her tiny apartment, staring at her belly button and the movements of Bump beneath it, would drive her bananas.

“No, my doctor says I should keep walking.” Beth groaned as she hoisted herself off the stool. “I’d like to strap a watermelon to his gut and send him around the block ten times. See what he thinks then.”

Tess patted her consolingly. “Pour yourself a cold drink and put your feet up as soon as you get home.”

“I’ll have to pry my shoes off first. My feet and ankles have swollen like bread dough.”

Tess offered her arm as they walked to the front door, a heavy slab of mahogany inset with leaded glass. She’d left it open to the June sunshine. “Randy’s going to be home tonight, isn’t he?” Beth’s husband drove a bakery delivery truck and was sometimes away overnight because his route was so sizable. From one end of the Upper Peninsula to the other was more than three hundred miles, and he delivered to northern Wisconsin as well.

“He promised. His boss even promised that Randy wouldn’t have to do any more overnighters, till Bump arrives, anyway.”

“Good.” Tess gave Beth a gentle squeeze. “You take care. Call me if anything happens. Or doesn’t. Call me if you just want to talk.”

Beth glanced into the main room of the library, which opened off the small entry hall and had been formed by knocking out walls between the house’s formal parlor and second sitting room. “You call me as soon as he leaves,” Beth whispered. She jerked her head at the lingering stranger. “I want to find out what’s up with him.”

“He’s probably going to ask me for directions to the lighthouse. Maybe he’s a photographer.”

Beth’s nose crinkled. “Maybe, maybe not.”

“Or a reincarnated lighthouse keeper bedeviled by nightmares he can’t explain.”

“Now you’re talking. But I bet you could come up with an even better scenario if you tried.”

Tess laughed. Her assistant knew her too well. “Go home, Beth.”

Beth went, waddling with one hand pressed to the small of her back and the other making a phone shape at her ear. “Call me,” she mouthed.

Tess waved Beth away, smiling to hide her unmollified worry over Randy’s late hours. His boss wasn’t as accommodating as he might have been, but there was no helping it. The Trudells were struggling to make ends meet. Beth’s parents, an older couple who’d had their only daughter late in life, had recently retired in Florida. They planned to return soon for an extended stay, to help Beth out with the baby, but until then, Randy and Tess were the young mother-to-be’s main support system. Aside from any number of do-gooders in the community who would be glad to pitch in and help in case of emergency.

Although the two women were primarily best friends, there were times Tess felt like Beth’s older sister, even her mother. If it was possible to be a mother when you’d never given birth yourself.

Tess frowned, spreading her hands over her flat tummy. Eleven years ago, she was on her way to a life just like Beth’s when—

Tess brushed off the sad memory. Dismissing the tragedy that had shaped her life had become easier with practice. And distance.

She walked into the main room, checking first on Lucy. The girl, a dreamy, inward child, not unlike Tess at that age, was completely absorbed in the book.

Tess’s second glance went to the make-believe pirate. “Sorry for the delay. How can I help you, Mr…?”

He came forward, not as tall as she’d assumed but still many inches past her five-two. Tall enough to make her tilt her chin up when she looked into his clear hazel-brown eyes.

“Connor Reed,” he said, offering his hand.

“Tess Bucek.” His hand was large and cool and dry. Hers was small and warm and moist. And they fit together just fine, for a brief moment that made her feel as if her cells were rushing like a warm river toward him. He let go then, and she blinked and said in a far too girlish voice, “Hi.”

His eyebrows drew down. “Hi.”

She said, “Connor Reed,” mulling over the name. It was naggingly familiar. “Are you from around here?”

“Not really.”

“I feel like I know you from somewhere….”

His features tightened. “I used to spend summers here, with my grandfather.”

“Did you?” She tried to picture Connor Reed as a boy and no bells rang. Summer people. They came and went, very few of them leaving a mark except for the trash they threw off their boats, the cash in the tills of local businesses and the rising prices of shoreline property. Not many of them ventured into the library with the distraction of sun-soaked days at the beach beckoning so near. Lake Superior was practically lapping at her doorstep.

“I don’t think we’ve ever met,” she said doubtfully, “so I can’t imagine how I’d know—”

“You don’t. You don’t know me.”

He was lying. She was certain. But why?

“Who’s your grandfather?” she asked, letting her suspicion show. Close-knit families were important to local folks. Their ties were meaningful, binding, unbreakable. And closed to outsiders. She knew first-hand.

Connor hesitated. “Addison Mitchell.”

She shook her head. Nothing.

“He moved away some time ago, but he’s been back for about a year now.”

“In Alouette?” The town was small enough that she knew just about everyone, at least by sight.

“Ishpeming. At a nursing home.”

“I see.”

Connor let out a soft breath. “He was once the Gull Rock lighthouse keeper.”

The lightbulb went on. “Oh. Of course—Old Man Mitchell!” Tess’s cheeks got warm when she realized how that sounded. “I mean, that’s what we always called him. Kids, you know. He used to chase us away from the lighthouse grounds.”

Connor said nothing in reply and her eyes narrowed. Sonny Mitchell had always lived alone, as far as she remembered, until the lighthouse had become automated and then decommissioned altogether a few years later. Gull Rock was quite isolated and austere. Sonny “Old Man” Mitchell had been a notorious crank.