Chapter 6 #2
“Not too busy for you.” Tugging off her heavy gloves, Lara wrapped an arm around Jesse’s shoulders and urged her up the cobbled path. “Come inside and I’ll pour us some iced tea.”
Together, they climbed the steps to the porch and into the house.
The living room was as tidy as the front yard, with well-worn furniture and framed photos of the family displayed on every surface, including the paneled walls.
There was nothing elegant or trendy in the house, but there was a warmth that no money could buy.
Lara disappeared through the opening to the kitchen, returning in less than ten minutes with two glasses of iced tea and a plate of homemade cookies.
“It’s sugared,” she warned as she handed Jesse a glass that was already beaded with sweat. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“I’m not a monster.” Jesse grabbed two sugar cookies before sinking onto the comfy sofa. “Who drinks tea without sugar?”
“Anyone under the age of thirty.” Lara rolled her eyes, sitting next to her. “No sugar. No carbs. No meat. Just raw broccoli and filtered water.”
Jesse demolished a cookie in two bites. “Trust me, I work at a nightclub where I meet plenty of young people. They eat total junk, just like I did growing up, only now they have it delivered instead of doing the drive-through.”
Lara sipped her tea. “I miss those days. At the time you think your kids will never grow up and you’ll be stuck living in a constant mess and running from one endless activity to another with no time to cook a proper dinner. And then they’re gone and you’re spending your day trimming bushes.”
“They are lovely bushes,” Jesse assured her.
Lara chuckled. “Yes, yes, they are.”
“I did have a reason for stopping by.”
“Do you need help with something? As you’ve discovered, my days are open.”
Setting the tea and remaining cookie on the coffee table, Jesse reached into her purse to pull out the photo she’d found in the shoebox.
Before leaving the bar, she’d taken several pictures of it with her phone, making it easier to zoom in to study the details.
She had no idea why that specific photo was in the safe, when dozens of others had disappeared.
It could be that it was her dad’s favorite picture of Tegan.
Or, she hoped, it might have something in it that could offer a clue.
That was what she was here to discover.
“Actually, I wanted to give you this.”
“How sweet.” Lara took the photo, a soft smile curving her lips as she recognized the image. “Oh, I remember this day. Tegan and Sam’s birthdays were just weeks apart, so we had their party together. This was their twelfth birthday. The last one before …”
Her words trailed away, a sadness rippling over her face.
“Yes.” Jesse leaned to point at Victoria, who was standing several yards away from the dozen guests and mounds of presents that surrounded Tegan and Sam.
Her deep red hair was carefully draped across half her face and her large sunglasses were perched on top of her head as she scowled toward someone to the side of her.
She looked more like a petulant fashion model than a devoted mom.
“Victoria doesn’t look very happy to be there,” she said.
Lara looked embarrassed. “It turned into something of a madhouse. My fault. You can tell by the picture I invited the entire town. I’m afraid Victoria might have felt a little ambushed when she showed up with Tegan and realized what I’d done.”
“Looks like fun to me.”
“Well, I thought so. I had Bea cater the lunch with hot dogs and hamburgers and mounds of cupcakes. And Kevin came over to set up the dance floor for the kids.”
Jesse arched her brows. “Kevin Allen was there? Noah’s dad?”
“Yeah, you can just see him in the background.” Lara ran her finger along the edge of the photo, where a burly man with a crew cut hairstyle was standing on a ladder as he hammered a board into place. “Noah was there too. He hung all the lights around the yard. It was a princess fairy theme.”
Jesse ignored her childish burst of envy. What did it matter that she’d never had a real birthday party growing up? Her father simply hadn’t understood it was important to a young girl.
With a small shake of her head, she concentrated on the picture. “Who’s that?”
Lara narrowed her eyes as she studied the young man who was standing next to the half-built stage. With his shaggy blond hair and casual pair of board shorts and T-shirt, he didn’t fit in with the gathered crowd.
“I’m not sure.” There was a short pause as Lara searched her memories. “Oh, wait. He came with Bea to arrange the food tables, and I asked him to help the DJ set up his equipment. I’m sorry, I don’t remember his name.”
Ah. That explained his bored expression. Every semester Bea reached out to the students who struggled to afford college classes so they could earn a little extra cash. Setting up a children’s party clearly hadn’t been on his favorite things to do list.
Jesse returned her attention to the fact that there had obviously been more than a few strangers at the party. Bea’s staff. The DJ. Whoever had arranged the bouncy castle she could see at the back of the yard. Maybe even someone to deliver and set up the balloons.
“That must have been quite a blowout,” she murmured. Lara flushed, as if she thought Jesse was judging her. Reaching out, Jesse gave her arm a gentle squeeze. “Sam is very lucky to have you as a mom.”
The flush faded and Lara’s smile returned. “Are you sure you don’t mind me keeping this?”
“I want you to have it.”
“I’ll treasure it.”
Lara placed the picture on a side table, next to a dozen other pictures of Sam, while Jesse, eating her second cookie, considered her next move.
She hadn’t figured out why her father would keep the birthday picture, or why he’d scribbled the note, but she would stew over what Lara had shared about the party later.
Maybe even ask Noah if he remembered anything about that day.
For now, she couldn’t waste an opportunity to discover everything possible about Victoria.
“I’m also hoping you can answer a few questions for me,” she announced, slowly forming a reasonable lie.
“Eventually, I plan to have a small service for my dad.” She held up a hand as Lara leaned forward, immediately prepared to start organizing the ceremony.
“Not yet. I have too much on my plate over the next few months. But someday.”
Lara politely hid her disappointment at the delay. “That would be nice. I’ve been hoping you would do something when the time was right. We all need the opportunity to mourn his loss.”
“Anyway, I have my dad’s family history and stories about my parents when they were together, but it wouldn’t feel right not to include something about Victoria and Tegan,” Jesse plowed on, refusing to feel guilty.
Maybe someday she would host a ceremony.
Stranger things had happened. “I don’t want people to think I’ve forgotten about them. ”
“No one would think that.”
Jesse grimaced. “It was no secret that I wasn’t as welcoming to my stepmother as I should have been.”
“Blended families are always difficult,” Lara sympathized. “Even when everyone is doing their best.”
Blended? There’d been nothing blended. More like two armed camps squaring off against each other. Jesse on one side. Victoria and Tegan on the other.
“True.” Her hands curled into fists. She couldn’t help herself.
Victoria’s destruction of her family was still an infected wound that refused to heal.
“I tried to pretend she didn’t exist. And now I realize I really don’t know anything about her life before she moved to Canton. I need you to fill in the gaps.”
Lara blinked. “Me? We were friends, but truthfully, Victoria didn’t really talk about her past. I know she moved to Canton after her husband died. She wanted a fresh start.”
“Moved from where?”
“I’m not sure.” Lara furrowed her brow. “I think they must have traveled around for a while. When they first arrived in town I asked Tegan if she was settling into school and she said that she was used to making new friends.”
Victoria had been equally cagey with Jesse’s father.
She’d tear up and dab at her eyes whenever anyone asked questions about her past. A perfect way to shut down awkward questions.
At the time, Jesse assumed she enjoyed the drama.
She hadn’t really considered the possibility she was hiding something.
“Did Victoria ever say why she chose Canton?”
“She always said it was a fluke of fate. Her car broke down outside of town, and she had to stay a few days while it was being fixed. She told me that she woke up on the day she was supposed to leave and decided that she didn’t want to. She’d fallen in love with Canton.”
Jesse snorted. A pretty story, but she didn’t believe it for a second. Not when Victoria had continually bitched about Canton being stuck in the dark ages. She wasn’t wrong—Canton was stuck in the dark ages—but why pretend she’d been eager to stay there?
Time for a new line of questioning. “I know she didn’t have any close family. The police tried to find a relative who could help them locate her after she and Tegan disappeared. As far as I know, they couldn’t discover anyone.” Jesse felt a stab of frustration. “Not that they tried that hard.”
“Yes, they asked me at the time, and I told them that she’d mentioned she’d been orphaned at a young age, and I don’t think she was close to her previous husband’s family.
After he died she told me that they’d cut her off.
And not just financially. It was just her and Tegan until she found Mac. And you, of course.”
The addition of Jesse was hastily tagged on. No surprise. There’d been no secret about Jesse’s relationship with her stepmother.
“Her husband was a doctor, wasn’t he?”
“A surgeon, I believe. She said he was rushing to an emergency when he died in a car crash.”
“You don’t know which hospital he worked at?”
“No, sorry.”