Picket Fence Surprise. Kris Fletcher
hand. “There was no way Papa Big Bucks would let his princess marry a rum-running Canuck, so Daisy and Charlie arranged to escape. But they knew they would need help getting away. Lucky for them, Charlie had an ace in the hole.”
“The treasure!” Millie called from the sofa, where she and Cady knelt in front of the window.
“Exactly.” Heather registered what she’d seen and turned back. “Mills, are you guys planning to draw on the windows?”
“Yes, Mom. But I double-triple checked. These are the safe markers.”
“Okay. Carry on.”
“Draw on the windows?” Xander’s hand hovered in midair, as if he’d been reaching for a cookie only to be frozen by fear.
“Don’t worry. They’re special markers. They wash right off.”
“Every time I think I have this parenting thing down...”
“Trust me, Xander. It’s a never-ending learning curve.” Heather grabbed a cookie. “Anyway, as you can imagine, the American authorities weren’t too fond of Charlie and his buddies. But at some point during his exploration of the area, Charlie found something.”
“A treasure?”
“So they say.”
“What was it?”
“Nobody—” Heather began, but Millie jumped off the sofa to join them.
“See, nobody knows for sure. But he found something, and he gave a piece of it to the police, and said, if you help me get away with Daisy, I’ll tell you where you can find the rest of it.” She sighed. “Except he got shot.” She formed her thumb and forefinger into a handgun. “Boom. Dead, just like that.”
“Boom!” Cady echoed, with a clap of her hands.
“Dead, eh?” Xander seemed suitably impressed. “Who shot him?”
Millie shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“No one was ever certain,” Heather said. “There was a shoot-out on the river. It was the middle of the night, and he pushed Daisy down in the boat, so she could hear but not see.” Heather spared a thought for poor terrified Daisy and what she must have gone through. “In any case, Daisy managed to get them here, to Comeback Cove, but he was already dead.”
“Let me guess.” Xander brushed crumbs from Cady’s shirt. “He died before he could reveal the location of the treasure.”
“Right,” Millie said. “He didn’t even get to tell Daisy. So it’s still out there.”
“Well, that seems unlikely.” Heather broke off a piece of cookie. “Those islands have been combed over and mapped and explored a lot since then. If something was there, it would have turned up by now.”
“It’s out there, Mom. I know it is.”
Xander raised an eyebrow. “Someone didn’t inherit your skeptical streak.”
Hadn’t had it drummed out of her by life and experience, more likely. And thank God for that.
Heather leaned down and grabbed a marker from Cady’s hand before it connected with Xander’s leg. “There’s a lot of legends and rumors around town, and every once in a while it will make the news or get featured in some article, and the loonies will descend. But mostly, people file it in the urban legend category.”
“After all this time, I can see why,” Xander said. “So what happened to Daisy?”
“She was taken in by Charlie’s family. Charlie Junior arrived a few months later. Her granddaughter still lives here. She runs Daisy’s Place—that bed-and-breakfast on Trillium Street.”
“I know that place.” He pointed to the laptop. “Okay. I like the idea. So show me what you’ve got.”
Heather pulled up a file. He scooted closer.
Purely so he could see better, she told herself.
“Here you go,” she said. “But I can’t make the margins and pictures line up the way I want. It should look like this.” She flipped through the notebook until she found her drawing. “I found tutorials on Google and YouTube, but I still can’t get it to come out right.”
“Let me see. You’re designing a trifold, right? Your layout looks clean. The balance is a bit off, but the rhythm is good. What are you putting in these spaces?” He pointed to empty boxes she had drawn in. “Photos? Treasure maps?”
“Yes. A treasure map on the front. How did you guess?”
“Logical conclusion.”
Of course. And that was good, she told herself. Better than thinking that they might be on the same wavelength.
“And those will be photos.” She pointed to the empty boxes. “Spots around town, of course, but one or two that aren’t as obvious. You know. Ones that convey that feeling of something hidden.”
“Yeah. Well, the good news is, this isn’t a difficult fix. You need to do a manual setup, I think, instead of one of the built-in templates. And you need to put in more breaks. But it shouldn’t be too hard to do.”
“It never is, until I actually have to do it.” She frowned at the laptop. “It’s so clear in my head. I hate to mess it up. And yeah, I know, a bit more practice and I should be able to do it myself, but I don’t have time to—”
Oh.
Parenting Truth Number 7: Sometimes, the answer is right in front of you.
“You did such a great job with the résumé. Could I hire you to work some computer magic for me? Make this as good as it is in my head?”
His grin was ridiculously boyish. “I thought you’d never ask.”
“You will? That’s wonderful.” She pointed at him. “But I am absolutely paying you this time.”
“Heather, it will take me half an hour, tops. It’s not worth payment.”
“Forget it. I’m not letting you have the files unless I can pay.”
He sighed and took another cookie. “Compromise. I tell you what half an hour of my time is worth, and you make a donation in that amount to the food bank.”
She couldn’t argue with that. Except it still struck her as taking advantage of him.
“Donation to the food bank and dinner. With real food this time.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wanted to grab them by the echo and shove them back inside. What the hell was she thinking? She was too aware of Xander as it was, and if there was anything less seductive than pizza and store-bought cookies consumed to the tune of little voices singing “Old MacDonald,” she didn’t want to imagine it. But to have him come back? Without any kids to act as a buffer?
Travis always told her she was her own worst enemy. She hated to know he’d called that one correctly.
“Dinner, huh?”
Well, great. He liked the idea.
“I don’t think I could turn that down. But I tell you what—I’ll make the changes here, with you, so you can follow along. That way you’ll know what to do next time.”
Her pulse slowed a little. That sounded very businesslike. Efficient. Certainly not like he was dying to be alone with her.
Good. As it should be. A friend helping a friend, and she was an idiot to be panicking, and anyway, it only took two to tango, and a laptop would definitely count as a third party. She was totally in the clear.
“I know you need to get moving on this,” Xander said. “I’m busy the next few nights, but how about Tuesday?”
She ran through her