Man In A Million

Randy studied her. “How do you know all this stuff?” Kitty knew everything about everyone.

“I’m in Addy Whitcomb’s quilting group. What she doesn’t know, she finds out.”

Randy rolled his eyes. “Of course. I understand even CNN goes to Addy when they want to confirm information. You want coffee? A doughnut, or something?”

Kitty shook her head. “Thanks. I’ve got a date tonight and I have to fit into my leather skirt.”

Randy and Chilly, headed for the door, stopped. “I thought we had clearance rights on all your dates,” Chilly said. “Who is this guy, and how come we don’t know about him?”

“He’s Mike Miller, the new guy on nights,” she supplied, her cheeks becoming a little pink. “And he works his days off for Whitcomb’s Wonders, just like you two. That makes him sort of preapproved.”

Hank Whitcomb, Addy’s son, had begun a sort of temp agency for craftsmen several years ago that now provided a broad variety of services for the homeowner or businessman. Whitcomb’s Wonders provided plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, gardening, furnace maintenance and a variety of other services. Randy worked with the janitorial crew on his days off. Chilly was on the gardening team. The simple work was a welcome relief from the life-and-death pressure of being a paramedic.

It was a boon for all of them to work part-time while going to school, raising children or living other dreams.

“What’s he do?” Randy asked.

“Carpentry,” she replied. “Jackie Whitcomb assures me he’s a gentleman. He redid the cabinets in their kitchen.”

Jackie was Hank’s wife and the mayor of Maple Hill. Her judgment could be trusted.

“Okay, then,” Chilly said. “But we want a full report tomorrow.”

“We’ll see.” The telephone rang and she picked it up. They waited to see if they were needed. She put a hand over the receiver. “It’s Mark and Charlie. They’re finished at the school and on their way back. Go have your coffee.”

Randy and Chilly loped across the lawn, headed for the bakery a block away. Randy glanced back in the direction of the driveway, absently wondering if the newly washed ambulance left sufficient room for the vehicle returning from the school, when he noticed a dark object on the pavement. He veered toward it and saw that it was black leather and shaped like an envelope. A light chain attached to it had a broken link on one end.

“What is that?” Chilly asked as Randy bent to pick it up. “Looks like a trucker’s wallet.”

Randy turned it over in his hand and, seeing no identification, unsnapped it and looked inside.

There were quite a few bills in it, some of small denomination, but a few twenties, and a lot of change. Glued to the inside of the flap was a business card with the Berkshire Cab telephone numbers on it.

“Ah,” Chilly said, looking over his shoulder. “It belongs to the lovely Miss O’Hara. What’s that?” He pointed to something tucked behind the bills.

Randy pulled out a foil wrapper that had been folded over. It was half of a chocolate bar. “Seems the lady has a chocolate habit.”

“Is that the first of your scientific observations?” Chilly asked with a grin.

Randy snapped the leather envelope closed. “I’ll take it back to Kitty. I’m sure the first time the lady tries to make change this afternoon, she’ll notice her missing wallet and call.”

Chilly snickered and followed as Randy hurried back to the office door, ran inside with the wallet and explained briefly to Kitty what had happened. “I don’t know,” he said when Randy reemerged. “It was weird. She stared at you as though she couldn’t believe you were real, yet she couldn’t wait to get away from you.”

“There’s money involved—she’ll call.” Randy started off again for the bakery. “And I do have this sort of mesmerizing effect on women. They can’t help but stare at me.”

Chilly responded to his teasingly conceited claim with the same matter-of-factness. “You have a similar effect on men, actually. We all thought evolution had filtered out the ugly and stupid, and yet, here you are. It makes one stare.”

“That’s it,” Randy replied. “Coffee’s on you.”

CHAPTER TWO

PARIS HAD NOTICED HER wallet was missing when she dropped off old Mr. Kubik at the senior center. He paid his fare with exact change and gave her a quarter tip—a routine he’d followed every week for eight months. She had a standing order to pick him up every Tuesday afternoon. She went to slip the money in the wallet always tucked under her right leg on the seat, but it wasn’t there.

She felt a moment’s panic. It had been a good day. She’d had that trip to Springfield, the generous Shriners on a tour of New England after their conference in Boston, and a lot of short hops from the nursing home that helped her make up in volume what the seniors couldn’t pay in tips.

She struggled to remember where she’d been, then concluded she had to have lost it at the fire station. She’d changed a twenty for Starla McAffrey and she’d had it then. Her next stop had been the fire station. Then she’d picked up Mr. Kubik.

Well. She wasn’t going back there. Prue, who drove whenever Paris needed a break, had promised to drive a few hours for her tonight while she made some phone calls. When her sister, Prue, had first returned home, she’d driven a full shift, but business was slow at night, and she’d taken a job at a dress shop instead. Paris would charm her into stopping to pick up the wallet.

Paris then remembered she was supposed to pick up her sister at the library in—she glanced at her watch—ten minutes. She would have to brace herself as she always did to deal with the misnamed Prudence. It was easier when their mother was home. Prudence took after Camille Malone with her bright beauty and her mercurial personality. They always had a lot to talk about, which left the quieter Paris to attend to the practical side of their existence. She did the grocery shopping, paid bills, kept up the checkbook.

She’d never minded that her mother and sister were beautiful and that she was simply passably pretty with a talent for steadiness and responsibility. It meant she took after her father, Jasper O’Hara, a kind and practical man who’d kept their lives together while Camille acted in New York or modeled in L.A. He’d been an accountant and he’d died of a coronary five years before.

Then that comforting sense of who she was exploded a year ago when she was taking an investigations class that involved blood testing and blood typing. She’d tested her own blood and discovered she was type A, scientifically impossible when both her parents were type O. Several years ago, her parents had given blood at a Red Cross blood drive and her father had come home joking that they were “Oh, oh,” giving it the inflection that suggested trouble. He’d said that that exclamation usually applied to everything they did.

It certainly applied at that moment when she tested her blood a second and then a third time. She couldn’t be Jasper O’Hara’s daughter.

She’d rushed home that weekend to confront her mother about it and watched the color drain from her face. Her mother had sat her on the sofa and explained that she was the result of an affair she’d had with a bit actor just before she met Jasper O’Hara.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she’d demanded.

“Because I married Jasper before you were born and he’s truly been your father. There was no need. We were happy. You were happy. It was…irrelevant.”

Irrelevant? Paris had wanted to argue but had been too shocked to find the right words, the right questions.

“You are who you are,” her mother had insisted, “and it doesn’t matter a damn who your father was. Besides,” she’d added, almost as an afterthought, “he’s dead. He was killed in a car accident right after you were born.”

Paris had insisted on a name.

“Jeffrey St. John,” her mother had finally revealed. “He’s dead, Paris. It doesn’t matter. Jasper O’Hara was your father.”

Paris had gone back to school but found herself unable to focus on her studies. She felt as though the very foundation of her life was cracked and unable to support the future she’d planned.

She’d come home, needing a dose of the stability of her old life before she could decide what to do about her future. She knew that didn’t make sense because her old life was based on her mother’s fabrication. But even though Jasper O’Hara hadn’t been her biological father, he’d been her biggest fan, and there was comfort in being where he’d been.

It saddened her to think that the steadiness that she’d always thought had come from him hadn’t. So where had it come from? A bit actor? Somehow, that seemed unlikely.

She reached instinctively for the chocolate stash in her wallet, forgetting that it was at the fire station. Great. Broke and without chocolate. Life was a cruel master.

With no pickups pending, Paris pulled into a parking spot across from the Common to wait for Prue.

The sight of the Maple Hill Square, or Common, had a grounding effect on her. Life here went on very much as it had two hundred years ago, though the Maple Hill Mirror had up-to-the-minute equipment instead of the old labor-intensive printing method that required inking by hand and rolling one sheet at a time. The early residents of the town had never heard of the mochaccinos produced at the Perk Avenue Tea Room down the way, and would have been horrified by the lengths of the skirts in the dress shop window.

Otherwise, the restored colonial buildings that framed the square looked the same, a colonial flag flew, and Caleb and Elizabeth Drake, who’d once fought the redcoats, still stood on the green, their images bronzed to remind Maple Hill of its heritage.

This was part of what she’d come home for, Paris thought. The eternity of life here, roots in the deep past, finger on the pulse of the future. To someone who felt lost, it provided a handhold on permanence.

Prue probably never felt lost. She had the temperament of an artist, but seemed always so sure of herself.