Wild Action. Dawn Stewardson
at the highway, not wanting to answer the question. But what else could she do?
Making something up wasn’t an option. She hated being lied to, so she never lied to anyone else unless she felt it was really necessary.
“I guess it doesn’t matter much at this point,” she finally said. “But Gus was in love with your mother.”
“What!”
“It’s true,” she told him gently. “They both were. Both Gus and your father. And when she chose your father, she broke Gus’s heart. That’s why he left town.
“But he assumed that after enough time had passed he’d stop caring. I guess he never did, though. Then he learned your parents had died. I I’m sorry about that.”
“Thanks,” Nick said, hoping she wouldn’t pursue the subject. His parents had been gone for five years, but he still didn’t like to talk about the crash.
They’d taken up their Cessna knowing a storm was closing in. And ever since, he’d wished he’d objected more strongly to the way they flew regardless of the weather. Not that they’d have listened, but still…
“Gus always kept in touch with a friend in Edmonton,” Carly continued. “Which is how he knew about their accident. And about your being a detective and all.”
Nick nodded, then sat staring out at the passing countryside, his thoughts returning to the story Gus had told Carly.
He’d certainly been a sly old fox, because the truth was what Nick’s parents had told him. There was no doubt about that. From the day his grandfather discovered that Gus had made off with their money, he’d never even allowed his elder son’s name to be spoken in his presence.
But Gus had obviously reinvented his past, making it tragically romantic—which certainly fit with everything Nick had ever heard about him.
Glancing across the van, he eyed Carly for a minute. In the bright sunlight, he could see there were pale freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose. Between that and the way the air conditioner’s breeze was playing with strands of her hair, she seemed a lot younger than she had in Brown’s office. Younger and very innocent-looking—the kind of woman who aroused a man’s protective instincts without even trying.
Not that she’d aroused his. The only reason he was hanging around was to protect his own interests. Hers simply happened to coincide.
“What did you know about your uncle?” she asked.
He hesitated, then said, “I guess not as much as I thought” For half a second, he’d considered telling her the truth. But since she’d cared for Gus, it would only upset her—assuming she’d even believe it
And she likely wouldn’t. If she’d worked with him for twelve years and referred to him as the sweetest man in the world, he must have really cleaned up his act
“You obviously didn’t know he’d gotten into the animal-actor business,” she said. “But you’ll get a kick out of hearing how it happened. Initially, he won a share of Wild Action in a poker game.”
Nick grinned. That sounded more like the uncle he’d always heard about He’d bet Gus had been cheating, too.
Carly looked over at Nick once more, thinking that while he was smiling might be a good time to bring the conversation back to the subject of Attila. But when she tried, she couldn’t make the bear’s name come out, so she said, “Then, eventually, Gus took over the entire agency. It was a smaller operation in those days, and it wasn’t doing very well, but he’d discovered he was good with animals. So he bought a big piece of property and began gradually attracting clients.”
Focusing on the road ahead once more, she told herself she was a chicken. And that she was going to have to tell Nick about the problem with Attila very soon.
But maybe it would be better to wait until they got home and he’d unpacked. And it would probably help to give him a stiff drink of Gus’s best Scotch first.
“What’s this movie we’re involved with?” he asked after she’d turned north onto Highway 12.
“It’s called Two for Trouble. And it’s basically about two ten-year-old boys who take off from summer camp and get lost in the woods. That’s the part of the film Jay will be shooting on Gus’s…our property. A lot of it’s forest.”
“And the stuff he’s shooting in Toronto?”
“Oh, those scenes are supposedly in Manhattan. And the summer camp’s supposedly in upper New York State—but they’ll actually be using Camp Runa-Muck, near Lindsay.
“At any rate, the opening scenes in the city show the parents getting the boys ready for camp. The adults are the name actors—Sarina Westlake and Garth Richards. You know them? She looks a lot like Meg Ryan, and he’s the Latin-lover type.”
“Uh-huh. I know the two you mean. They’re married in real life, aren’t they?”
“Yes. But in the movie they play single parents who fall in love while they’re helping search for their kids.”
Nick waited for Carly to go on. When she didn’t, he said, “That’s it? That’s all there is to the plot?”
“Well, Jay’s the kind of director who improvises, so I expect he’ll add a few extra wrinkles during the shooting.”
“Or maybe a lot of extra wrinkles? I mean, it doesn’t exactly sound like a box office smash.”
“Let’s just hope it is, because Gus held out for a small percentage of the profits.”
“Oh? How small?”
She held up her hand with her thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart
“Oh,” Nick said, looking disappointed.
“He did really well to get anything. In any event, the movie might turn out to be a lot better than the story line sounds. I’ve read the script, and there’s pretty good adventure and drama, what with the boys in a woods full of wild animals.”
“And Attila’s one of the wild animals?”
She nodded but didn’t elaborate. It really would be better to leave any further discussion of that until later.
“We’re almost home,” she said, pointing toward the township sign and changing the subject.
“Township of Scugog,” Nick read aloud.
“In Ojibway, it means ‘muddy, shallow water.’”
“Ahh.”
When he seemed content to simply watch the passing scenery for the remainder of the trip, Carly let her thoughts drift back to the meeting in Brown’s office. Nick had taken the bad news a lot more coolly than she would have. But she had a horrible feeling he wasn’t going to be even half as cool when it came to Attila.
Turning onto the Sixth Line, she decided it might be smart to give her new partner four or five drinks of Gus’s best Scotch before they talked about Attila.
WHEN THEY TURNED ONTO the gravel road that Carly said led to the house, Nick could see she hadn’t been joking about a lot of their property being forest.
Huge trees overhung the road on either side, with only the hydro poles and power lines to indicate this wasn’t really the middle of nowhere. Then the road curved and they were at one edge of a fifteen-or twenty-acre clearing with the house ahead in the distance.
Built of gorgeous old fieldstone, it had white gingerbread trim on both the second-story gables and the overhang of the porch. He was just about to comment on how nice it was when four large gray blurs appeared from nowhere and streaked toward the van.
“Wolves?” he said anxiously. “You didn’t tell me we had wolves.”
“We