The In-Between Hour. Barbara White Claypole
not good with names, little lady,” Jacob said.
“That’s okay. I answer to anything. Call me Hey You if it’s easier.”
“Hannah,” Will said, his voice sluggish. “Her name is Hannah.”
“That’s a pretty name, name for an angel, but I like Hey You better.”
“Hey You, it is. I love your necklace.” Hannah nodded at the string of bear claws that hung on his chest. “Occaneechi?”
Jacob’s eyes crinkled.
“Yes,” Will answered. “My dad is Occaneechi.”
Will Shepard was Native American? Although, something about his square jaw and thick eyebrows... Yes, she could believe he had native ancestry.
“My mother—” Will pushed his sunglasses up into his hair, and Hannah gasped “—was not.”
* * *
“What do you mean you’ve seen his eyes before? Haunting as they are. Huge and icy blue.” Poppy swirled wine around her goblet and then drained the glass.
The sun disappeared behind the treetops, and Hannah brushed an oak leaf from one of the cushions under her arm. Dry and brittle, the leaf crumbled to ashes, then scattered into the air.
“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “They’re so distinctive, so familiar.”
Jacob was napping when Poppy had arrived, but she’d insisted on staying for a girls’ night. A feeble excuse, no doubt, to keep Will in her sights. And the overnight bag and large screw-top bottle of wine suggested Poppy intended to get snookered in the process.
Poppy had a proclivity for dating guys who were either married or inherently messed up, and Will Shepard clearly fell into at least one of those categories. The absence of a wedding ring meant nothing, but Will didn’t act like someone who was married. He did, however, act like a person in pain, pain that went beyond a mere headache. You didn’t have to be a holistic practitioner to understand that physical symptoms often hinted at emotional distress. Hannah chose not to think about the study she’d read that morning, the one linking depression with heart disease.
She and Poppy slid back and forth on the retro metal rocker, both of them watching Will retrieve a brown bag of groceries from the trunk of the Prius.
“Hubba-hubba,” Poppy said. “Look at the muscles on those forearms. Girl, I bet he gives new meaning to the term sexual endurance.”
“Maybe he spends his nights hanging from the rafters.”
“Think he’s dating right now?” Poppy fiddled with the array of elastic bands on her left wrist, none of which represented anything other than her love of bright colors.
“He has a son, Poppy. Kids tend to come with mothers.”
“It’s weird, there’s so little about his personal life on the web. It’s all work, work, work. Wikipedia doesn’t even mention that he’s a dad.”
So, they’d both checked him out.
“At one time he was linked briefly with that New York socialite who died a few months back,” Poppy continued.
“No idea what you’re talking about.”
“You should read the gossip mags, Han. She killed herself, her lover and their son. Smashed their car into a wall. Theory is her brakes went, which is pretty suspect. Smacks of a cover-up if you ask me. But nothing I found says he’s married. Used to be a player, these days he seems to be a monk. What a waste of that body.”
“I’m changing the subject. Tell me what you know about Jacob.”
“Not much to tell. Sundays were skeleton staff days at Hawk’s Ridge—the director told me sweet-shit-nothing about the residents. Jacob has short-term memory loss, adored his wife, worships his grandson. Figured all that out by myself.”
“And Will?”
“Didn’t know Jacob had a son until I butted into Will’s meeting. Bad blood between them, if I had to guess. What’s the Galen update?”
“He’s coming home next week. Inigo’s promised to pay for his ticket and give us a two-week pass before he visits. Until he can check his melodrama at the door, Inigo’s a problem I can’t handle. He was completely hysterical in California. It was like having a third child.” Hannah sighed. “Sometimes I wonder what my parents were thinking, allowing me to marry at nineteen.”
“Could they have stopped you?”
“No.” Hannah smiled. “He was hard to resist in those days—the exotic name, the Celtic heritage, that sexy smile.” Her in-laws had scheduled Inigo for greatness from inception, hoping he would become a famous architect like his namesake, Inigo Jones. And Inigo carried himself with a confidence that suggested he believed the family propaganda. But he alienated his parents in three easy steps: he married a high school classmate who wanted only to be a country vet, then he became an English professor, and for his pièce de résistance, he changed his sexual orientation.
“Of course, now my ex is a dick.”
Poppy snorted out a laugh. “Finally, after six years she trashes her ex. Proud of you, girl. So, it all worked out, then. With the cottage.”
Will balanced the bag on his hip as he tugged open the screen door.
“I guess,” Hannah replied, chewing the inside of her cheek.
* * *
The screen door slammed and Will turned to watch the two women on the porch drinking red wine.
Hannah and Poppy were clearly plotting, leaning toward each other in a female conspiracy. Maybe they were discussing him and his dad, trying to figure out their relationship. Good luck on that one. Thirty-four years of living the relationship and he couldn’t figure it out.
Will placed the last bag of groceries on the kitchen table and headed upstairs to check on the old man. Exhausted from the stress of food shopping, his dad had gone upstairs to lie down the moment they’d returned. Wise move. Normally, grocery shopping was heaven on earth: the smells, the tastes—grazing around the free samples, concocting recipes in his head. Before Freddie’s death, buying fresh produce was the closest Will came to a hobby. Today, with his dad, it had ranked on par with drug-free wisdom teeth removal. Next time, he’d hire a dad-sitter.
The stairs creaked as Will dragged himself up by the banister. The ceiling of the stairwell was midnight blue and covered with plastic glow-in-the-dark stars, the same ones he’d stuck all over Freddie’s bedroom. When the interior decorator had finished, Will had balanced on a stepladder for hours, creating a perfect constellation for his two-year-old. After the accident, he’d destroyed it in minutes—ripping down stars, paint and drywall. When he returned to New York, he would hire another decorator, a cheaper one, to erase the evidence of grief.
The upstairs hallway in the cottage was empty except for a large black-and-white photo framed and hung at the far end. The photographer had captured the woods at sunrise in early April. Dogwoods, in full bloom, rose like ghosts through a veil of early-morning fog.
Everything else in the hall was white like the edges of a dream. Interesting how different white could be. White in Hannah’s hands seemed to be warm and calming. White in his apartment was cold and sterile. And since all his furniture was crafted out of pale wood, the only color came from his lime leather sofa. One of his ex-lovers had referred to it as the bilious margarita.
Will ran his hand over the hall railing, reading the grain. Wood could reveal a thousand stories. He’d done some carving as a kid, inspired by his dad’s garden sculptures of downed tree limbs. He and Ally had once imagined them to be fantastical creatures. By the time he was a teenager, Will saw them for what they really were—talismans.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, pushing against the crouching headache, the throbbing pain. Nothing about this trip