Finding You Page 2

  J.D. was fully awake again. “So Cozie and Seth Hawthorne both work for the Vanackerns. She’s got to be making a fortune on this book.” He picked at the adhesive tape around the IV on his wrist, his brow furrowed in concentration. “Meanwhile the brother’s a glorified handyman. Can’t sit too well.”

  “You saw him with Julia. Do you think she had herself a little affair with the hired help?”

  “And he came down here looking for her, she told him to suck eggs, and he had enough and decided to blow her rich ass out of the sky. It’s possible.” J.D. heaved a sigh. “If that’s the case, we were just a frigging bonus.”

  Daniel was staring at Cozie Hawthorne’s picture on the back of her book. How had she taken to her unexpected success? From her book, he’d guess money impressed her about as much as it did J.D. “I don’t like being a bonus.”

  “Me neither. Hell, you know what they say: I’d rather be shot at and hit than shit at and missed.”

  “We’re way ahead of ourselves, you know.” Daniel maintained an outward calm. “Our copter’s under water. I can’t even prove it was sabotaged.”

  J.D.’s black eyes narrowed. “Maybe it wasn’t.”

  “I know. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I’m just poking under other people’s rocks to keep from seeing what’s under my own.” He turned away from J.D.’s probing gaze. They’d been partners and friends a long time, he and James Dell Maguire. “I’ve been calling realtors in Woodstock. Turns out Cozie Hawthorne herself has a place for rent right on Hawthorne Orchard Road.”

  “You rented it?”

  Daniel smiled. J.D. knew him well. “Under an assumed name. No point in stirring the bottom unless I’ve got good reason. Right now, I don’t. I leave in the morning. I’m driving up, giving myself time to think. I don’t want to be hunting a scapegoat when the real culprit’s staring at me in the mirror. But I want to know what Seth Hawthorne was doing down here.”

  “Keep me posted,” J.D. said quietly.

  “I will.” He nodded to Mountain Views. “Make sure you read her piece on the moose-sighting craze. It’s probably the only one that won’t piss you off.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “Take care, J.D.” His eyes drifted to J.D.’s mangled leg. “I’ll be in touch.”

  He was halfway to the door when J.D. said, “If Seth Hawthorne didn’t put me here, Daniel, you did. When I’m on my feet, you’ll answer for it.”

  Daniel looked back at his broken, bruised, and bloodied friend. A full recovery seemed impossible. “You get back on your feet, J.D., and I’ll answer for anything.”

  Chapter

  2

  The smell of apples sweetened the crisp Vermont morning air as Cozie cranked her ancient cider press. Even with getting home from New York after midnight, she’d been up early and out in the field collecting apples. She’d put on baggy jeans and ratty mud shoes and pulled her hair back with a thick rubber band off a bunch of broccoli, then threw on her father’s old black-and-red checked wool shirt. Cidermaking was a fall Hawthorne family tradition. Nothing could make her feel more at home, more like herself again.

  Clear, amber-colored cider dribbled into the spotless bucket she’d set under the spout. Behind her was the white clapboard house Elijah Hawthorne had built in 1790, all around her the land he had settled—the rolling fields, the woods, the old stone walls. This was her childhood home, where generations of Hawthornes had grown up. For the past ten years she’d lived up the road in an early nineteenth-century sawmill she’d renovated.

  But in July all that had changed when she’d bought the Hawthorne house and surrounding land from her widowed mother, whose strapped financial condition was about to force her to sell to strangers. Emily Hawthorne had made it clear she wanted to be free—financially, physically, and emotionally—from two centuries of her husband’s family traditions. After she and her daughter had closed the deal, she bought a condo in a refurbished building in town, within walking distance of shops, restaurants, and the library, and planned a trip to New Zealand and Australia. Last heard from, she was having a grand time in Perth.

  As much as Cozie loved her family’s land and the crumbling old house, she had never expected she would end up its sole owner. She’d assumed it would go to her brother or sister, or they’d all share in its ownership.

  She paused in her cidermaking, trying to absorb every nuance of the beautiful morning. The sky was a clear, autumnal blue, setting off the dark evergreens and the reds and yellows and oranges of the deciduous trees on the hills around her. Across the unlined road, she could hear Hawthorne Brook rushing over rocks on its mad dash toward the Ottauquechee River. Leaves rustled in the breeze.

  “I know where you are. I can always find you.”

  She shuddered. It would take awhile for her to forget her caller’s parting words as she’d left her hotel room yesterday afternoon for an early dinner with her agent. She breathed in the smell of the cider, the smell of the clean air. She just needed to be patient. Given time, all would be well.

  Her brother’s rusting hulk of a truck turned up her loop-shaped dirt driveway, bouncing into the gravel parking area out back where she’d set up the cider press. Seth jumped out. He was twenty-five, six years younger than Cozie, taller and lankier, and darker, but with the same green eyes and sometimes irritatingly practical outlook on life. He lived in a small farmhouse—which Cozie also now owned—on the northern end of the Hawthorne woods.

  “Hey, you’re back,” he said by way of a greeting. “I came by last night but you weren’t around.”

  “Plane was delayed. I didn’t get in until after midnight.”

  “I don’t know, Coze.” He looked her over, giving her one of his lazy grins. He had on tattered jeans, a cheap, frayed rust-colored flannel shirt, and old work boots. “You don’t look any different now that you’ve been interviewed on the Today show.”

  “Ouch—you saw that?”

  “Yep. Rolled out of bed, and here was my sister cackling on TV. How come you didn’t call and let us know you were going to be on?”

  “It was one of those last-minute things, and I did not cackle.” But he’d already started back toward the toolshed, a small outbuilding a long-ago Hawthorne had put up and Grandpa Willard had painted barn red. “What’re you up to?”

  “I’m bringing a load of wood up to your new tenant. Sal called yesterday and said the guy had just figured out the place was heated with wood and was freezing his ass off. You have an extra splitter he can borrow, right?”

  “Who can borrow? Seth, I haven’t talked to Sal.” Sal O’Connor was Cozie’s realtor, a transplanted New Yorker who could sell Vermont—at least her vision of it—to anyone. “I don’t know anything about a tenant. Who is he?”

  She’d followed her brother to the toolshed, where he plucked a heavy, unwieldy splitting maul from a nail just inside the door. “Some flatlander.”

  “How long has he been here?”

  “Two or three days. I haven’t met him yet.”

  “I figured I’d be out of luck finding a renter until ski season, especially the way Sal talked. Maybe I should go up with you, check this guy out.”

  Seth shrugged. “Climb in back—Zep’s got the front.”

  Zep was the family dog, a half-German shepherd, half-everything else mutt who had certain privileges no one bothered to argue. “Did he behave while I was gone?” Cozie asked.

  “He doesn’t behave when you’re here.”

  “That’s because you spoil him.”

  Seth tossed her the splitter, which she tucked under one arm as she climbed atop the cordwood. In another minute, they were bouncing down the driveway, Cozie breathing in the smell of bark, sawdust, and wood mold and thinking of herself as a landlady.

  At the end of the driveway, while Seth waited for a break in traffic, she looked back at her old white clapboard farmhouse nestled into the rolling hills of south-central Vermont and tried to see not just all the work she had to do, not just her own memorie
s and abandoned dreams, but what the tourists out on Hawthorne Orchard Road saw. The smoke curling from the stone chimney. The wood neatly stacked for winter. The stone walls marking off fields of young Christmas trees and gnarled old apple trees and tall grass glistening in the morning sun. The huge sugar maples with their red-gold leaves, and the fire bushes and yellow mums and gardens of pumpkins and grapes and bushy herbs.

  It was all so quintessentially Vermont, so damned beautiful.

  The leaf peepers would likely never guess a family of garter snakes had taken up residence in her dirt cellar and a bat was loose upstairs. That a dormer leaked. That there was precious little romance in facing an empty woodbox on a below-zero January night.

  Growing up, Cozie would have helped her father dispense with the snakes and told him she’d never have snakes in the cellar. But some things were inescapable, and her father had been dead for almost two years.

  Seth swooped out onto the road and in less than a mile turned down a steep dirt driveway toward Hawthorne Brook, where her small 1803 sawmill was tucked on a hillside. Constructed of dark, almost black, rough-hewn lumber, it overlooked an old stone dam that formed a tiny pond and ten-foot waterfall on the fast-flowing brook. Cozie loved to lie in her rope hammock out on the porch directly above the pond and listen to the water flow over the dam.

  Used to love it, she amended. She didn’t live here anymore. Some flatlander did. But as she grabbed the splitter and jumped down off the wood, it was as if she’d never left.

  Then a dark, long-legged man walked out onto her porch, and she had to admit that here, definitely, was proof that Cozie Hawthorne no longer lived in her little sawmill by the brook.

  “Geez, Seth,” she muttered as her brother came up beside her, “you could have warned me. This guy looks like he could rope a buffalo.”

  Seth didn’t seem impressed. “I’d have liked to have seen him crawling out of bed this morning with no heat.”

  Flatlander though he might be, the man ambling down the porch steps did not look unfamiliar with the basic skills of survival. He was tall—over six feet—and had a thick, muscular build that his black canvas shirt and close-fitting jeans only served to emphasize. His shirtsleeves were rolled to just above his wrist bones. His dark hair was windblown, and his sharp, imperfectly formed features, his alert gray eyes, his tanned skin, suggested a life not spent in an office building of the great megalopolis to the south. He had on scarred black boots distinctly not Vermont in style.

  Seth was all business. “Good morning. Sal O’Connor sent me with the wood.”

  “Great. I could use some.”

  “Where you want it?”

  “Wherever you think best.”

  His voice was deep and sounded as if it had been rubbed with sandpaper, and his accent was from somewhere decidedly farther south than New Jersey. Cozie glanced at the black truck parked crookedly in her former parking space and noticed its Texas license plate. Well, no wonder he hadn’t worried about heat in October. She’d changed planes in Dallas on her latest book tour. It had been stiflingly hot in the jetway.

  Seth, who could meditate for hours on where to locate his own woodpile, abruptly started back to his truck. “We’ll stack some on the porch where it’ll be handy. The rest we’ll stack here by the driveway. You’ll need to cover it.” He cast the Texan a look that, unusual for easygoing Seth Hawthorne, bordered on hostility. “We get snow up here in the winter, you know.”

  His sarcasm had no apparent effect on its target, who turned to Cozie after her brother had climbed back into his truck. “Who is he?”

  “Oh—I’m sorry, we should have introduced ourselves. My name’s Cozie. Cozie Hawthorne. I—um—own the mill. Seth’s my brother.”

  Her tenant gave her a quick but efficient once-over. The gray of his eyes, she saw, was clear and dark, a true slate gray. “So you’re my new landlady.”

  His controlled, laconic manner, coupled with his Texas accent, gave his words an almost possessive quality that Cozie hoped she was just imagining. He seemed to be waiting for her to respond. “Yes, I guess I am.”

  “I’m Daniel Forrest. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Likewise.” Having never been a landlady, she had no idea what she was supposed to say to a new tenant, especially one for whom she was so totally unprepared. “Everything’s okay?”

  “Now that I’ve figured out the place is heated with wood I should be fine.” His gaze rested on her. “Rough getting out of the shower on a frosty Vermont morning.”

  Cozie cleared her throat. She didn’t need to be picturing Daniel Forrest running stark naked from the shower into her former loft bedroom.

  But she was.

  “Did Sal mention that sometimes a bat or flying squirrel might work its way into the loft?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, “she didn’t.”

  “Well, it probably won’t happen. If there’s a problem, just give me a call. I’ve gotten pretty good at dealing with bats—not that I’ve had that many. And the flying squirrels aren’t bad at all. I’ve only had four or five in all the time I’ve been here.” Go ahead, Coze, dig a deeper hole for yourself.

  Daniel Forrest remained quite calm. “I’m sure I’ll manage.”

  Cozie was sure he would, too.

  “Anything else?” he asked mildly.

  “I’m not sure if Sal…there’s no garbage disposal, you know, but there is a compost pile on the other side of the house, down this little path.” The way he was looking at her, she assumed he had no idea what she was talking about. “You do know what a compost pile is?”

  He seemed amused. “Yes, ma’am, I know.”

  She decided not to mention about not throwing coffee grounds down the drain and using only lowsuds detergent in the washing machine. Surely Sal had told him that stuff. She’d warned Cozie that most people wouldn’t consider her converted wood-heated sawmill a year-round residence.

  Was Daniel Forrest here just temporarily? She’d have to talk to Sal, get the details.

  “I live just down the road in the white house with the black shutters, if you need anything.”

  Before he could respond, Seth honked his horn, and they got out of his way. The truck bed rose up, and logs tumbled out in a huge heap. When Seth got back out, Zep, with no display of grace or manners, jumped out and leaped into the little pond.

  “Better show Texas here how to split wood, Coze,” Seth said when he rejoined them. “Wouldn’t want him lopping off an ankle before he’s been here a week.”

  His words would have set her off, but Daniel Forrest regarded her brother without apparent irritation. “It’s all right. I can handle the wood from here on out. Thanks.”

  Seth was unmoved. “That woodpile’s all that stands between you and freezing your butt off on a cold morning.”

  The Texan gave him a tolerant smile. “So I’ve discovered.”

  “Show him, Coze.”

  She had no intention of showing anyone anything, but before she could make up her mind how to handle the situation, Daniel Forrest took a log from the pile and set it upright on her old chopping block on the edge of the driveway. He put a hand out to her. She turned over the splitting maul. She could feel the wind whipping strands of hair from her haphazard ponytail and figured she and Seth weren’t coming off too well right now.

  “Better stand back,” Seth warned her.

  She took his advice, just in case.

  Using both hands, the Texan raised the heavy splitter above his head with an ease that even Seth, as contemptuous of flatlanders as he was, had to notice. He paused for a beat, then heaved the splitter down onto the log, whacking it neatly in two.

  Cozie figured there had to be a column in this somewhere. She picked up the half that landed at her feet. “Well, brother, seems the man’s done this before.”

  But Seth’s green eyes remained pinned on the Texan. “You know how to stack wood so it doesn’t come down on top of you?”

  “I alternate vertical and ho
rizontal rows.”

  So did Seth. Cozie resisted a laugh, not that her brother deserved her loyalty. In his view, no flatlander—even one from Texas—would survive a week in Vermont without help from the natives. Usually, however, he was more good-natured about his prejudices.

  “How much do I owe you?” the Texan asked.

  “I’ll let you know.”

  Unchastened, Seth gave Zep a yell. The big mutt came galloping out of the pond and waited to shake himself off until he was directly behind Cozie’s new tenant, who ended up sprayed with cold, muddy water. Daniel Forrest didn’t jump in surprise or curse or even wince, but just calmly looked around at the offending beast. “Feel better, fella?”

  Cozie observed his reaction with interest. She didn’t know what the man did for a living or why he was in Vermont, but he was one controlled individual.

  Seth got Zep back in the truck and went around to the driver’s side while Cozie climbed in back. She saw the question in the Texan’s eyes and grinned. “Zep always gets the front.”

  He swung the splitter onto one strong shoulder. “I’m sure.”

  Without warning, the truck lurched up the steep driveway, sending Cozie sprawling. She grabbed the cold tailgate to keep herself from smacking her mouth against it and knocking out a few teeth. She wished she’d worn work gloves. She’d had her nails manicured in San Diego.

  Holding on tight as her brother careened up the driveway, she didn’t dare duck or even let go long enough to peel back the strands of hair that had blown into her mouth. Her wool shirt, she now noticed, smelled faintly of tractor grease and rotten apples. She probably had a red nose.

  Daniel Forrest was standing with the splitter on his shoulder, watching her.

  She almost yelled back to him that she was the editor-in-chief of an award-winning newspaper one of her ancestors had founded, that she’d had a book on The New York Times best-seller list for weeks and weeks, that she was famous, dammit, and he could quit looking at her as if she were some kind of wild-haired lunatic mountainwoman.