The Winter Lodge

“No.” She straightened up, pulled herself together, even forced a brave smile. What sort of person was she, thinking like that under these circumstances? She gave him a gentle slug on the upper arm, which seemed to be made of solid rock. “Excellent shoulder to cry on, Chief.”

He joined her obvious attempt to lighten things up. “To protect and serve. Says so right on my badge.”

She faced the fire investigator, brushing at her cheeks. “Sorry. I guess I needed a breakdown break.”

“I understand, miss. The loss of a home is a major trauma. We advise an evaluation with a counselor as soon as possible.” He handed her a business card. “Dr. Barrett in Kingston comes highly recommended. Main thing is, don’t make any major decisions for a while. Take it slow.”

She slipped the card into her back pocket. It was amazing that she could slip anything into that pocket. The borrowed jeans were constricting her in places she didn’t know she had. The tour continued and somehow she managed to hold it together despite the enormity of her loss. In less than a month, she’d lost Gram, and now the house where she had lived every day of her life.

The official determination had yet to be made, but both the investigator and even the suspicious insurance adjuster seemed to agree that the fire had started in the crawlspace of the attic. Very likely faulty wiring had been the cause. The Sniffer had detected no accelerant and there were no obvious signs of deliberate mischief.

“What next?” she asked the adjuster, exhausted after the tour of the ruins. She wondered if this was what the aftermath of battle was like, picking over the remains of something that had been whole and alive, vibrant with houseplants, family photos on the walls, mementos of milestones and gifts exchanged for birthdays and Christmases, one-of-a-kind keepsakes like handwritten recipes and old letters.

The adjuster pointed out her computer, which lay amid a pile of ugly, scorched upholstery with batting that burst out of the melted holes like entrails.

“That your laptop?” he asked.

“Yes.” It was closed, the top blistered.

“We can have a technician check it out. The hard drive might have survived.”

Doubtful, though. He didn’t say so, but she could read it in his face. All her data was gone—WordPerfect files, financial records, photo albums, addresses, e-mail, the bakery’s QuickBooks. Her book project. She kept backups, but stored them in the drawers of a desk that was now a pile of ashes.

Her shoulders slumped at the thought of trying to reconstruct everything.

“She’s a writer,” Rourke told the investigator.

“Really?” The man looked intrigued. “You don’t say. What do you write?”

Jenny felt sheepish. She always did when people asked about her writing. Her dream was so big, so impossible, that sometimes she felt she had no right to it. She—small-town, uneducated Jenny Majesky, wanted to be a writer. It was one thing to publish a weekly recipe column, fantasizing in private about something bigger and better, yet quite another to own up to her ambitions to a stranger.

“I do a recipe column for the local paper,” she mumbled.

“Come on, Jen,” Rourke prodded. “You always said you’d write a book one day. A bestseller.”

She couldn’t believe he remembered that—or that he’d say so in front of this guy.

“I’m working on it,” she said, her cheeks flushing.

“Yeah? I’ll have to look for it in the bookstore,” the adjuster remarked.

“You’ll be looking for a long time,” she told him ruefully. “I’m not published.” She sent Rourke a burning look. Blabbermouth. What was he thinking, telling her dreams to a total stranger?

She figured it was because Rourke didn’t take her seriously. Didn’t think she had a snowball’s chance. She was a bakery owner in a small mountain town. She would probably always be a bakery owner, hunched over the bookkeeping or growing old and crusty at the counter of the store, maybe even learning to call customers “doll” and “hon.”

“What?” Rourke demanded after the adjuster went to his car. “What’s that look?”

“You didn’t have to say anything about the book.”

“Why not?” His guileless expression was infuriating. “What’s got your panties in a twist?” he asked.

The fact that they were men’s boxers was one problem, but she didn’t say anything. “Bestseller,” she muttered. “How stupid would it look if I went around telling people, ‘I’m writing a bestseller.’“

He looked genuinely mystified. “What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s totally presumptuous. I write, okay? That’s all. It’s up to the people who buy books to make something a bestseller.”

“Now you’re splitting hairs. It’s giving me a headache. You once told me that publishing a book would be a dream come true for you.”

He really didn’t get it. “It is a dream,” she told him fiercely. “It’s the dream.”

“I didn’t know it was some big secret.”

“It’s not. It just isn’t something I go around blabbing to every Tom, Dick and Harry. It’s … to me, it’s something sacred. I don’t need to broadcast it.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Because if it doesn’t happen, I’ll look like an idiot.”

He threw back his head and guffawed.

She had a clear memory of herself fresh out of school, poised to leave town, telling people, “Next time you see my face, it’ll be on a book jacket.” And she’d truly believed that. “This is not some joke,” she said tightly.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “When was the last time you thought someone was an idiot for going for her dream?”

“I don’t think that way.”

He smiled at her. There was such kindness in his face that she felt her resentment fading. “Jenny. Nobody thinks that way. And the more people you tell your dream to, the more real it’s going to seem to you.”

She couldn’t help smiling back. “You sound like a greeting card.”

He chuckled. “Busted. It was on a card I got for my last birthday.”

There was something about the way he was sticking so close by her. “Don’t you have somewhere you need to be?” she asked. “Some police-chiefing to do here in Sin City?” She gestured at Maple Street, still pristine under its mantle of new-fallen snow.

“I need to be right here with you,” he said simply.

“To pick up the pieces if I fall apart.”

“You’re not going to fall apart.”

“How can you be so sure?”

He grinned again. “You’ve got a bestseller to write.”

She thought about the ruined, blistered laptop. “Uh-huh. Here’s the thing, Rourke. The project I’ve been working on … it wasn’t on a hard drive. It was all there.” She indicated the blackened skeleton of the house, now a smoldering ruin. She felt physically sick when she thought of the box of her grandmother’s recipes and writings, which Jenny had so carelessly left on the kitchen table. Now those one-of-a-kind papers were lost forever, along with photographs and mementos of her grandparents’ lives. “I might as well give up,” she said.

“Nope,” said Rourke. “If you quit writing because of a fire, then it probably wasn’t something you wanted that bad in the first place.” He took a step closer to her. He smelled of shaving soap and cold air. He was careful not to touch her here in broad daylight with people swarming everywhere. Yet the probing way he regarded her felt like an intimate caress. He was probably still mortified by the picture on the front page of the paper. She was not exactly lingerie model material.